Hindi
NYIFF: ‘Labour of Love’ wins best film; Nawazuddin & Kalki bag best actor awards
NEW DELHI: Labour of Love written and directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta won awards for best film, best screenplay and best director award at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF).
On the other hand, actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui got the Best Actor award for Haraamkhor, whereas Kalki Koechlin won the Best Actress award for her performance in
In Haraamkhor, which is directed by Shlok Sharma, Siddiqui plays a married teacher in love with his student, essayed by Shweta Tripathi. In Margarita, With a Straw,directed by Shonali Bose, Koechlin is seen as Laila, an outgoing wheelchair bound teenager with cerebral palsy who is absolutely determined to have a normal life despite her challenges.
The week-long 15th annual festival ended earlier this month with the New York premiere of Dum Laga Ke Haisha, a Yash Raj production starring Ayushmann Khurrana and debutante Bhumi Pednekar, directed by Sharat Katariya.
Set in the crumbling environs of Calcutta, the film Labour of Love tells the story of two ordinary lives suspended in the duress of a spiraling recession. They are married to a cycle of work and domesticroutine and long stretch of waiting in the silence of an empty house; they share each other’s solitude in pursuit of a distant dream that visits them briefly every morning.
Vignesh and Ramesh received the Best Child Actor award for the Tamil film Kaakaa Muttai. Directed by Manikandan M, the film tells the story about how two slum boys are consumed by the desire to taste a pizza after the opening of a pizza parlour on their old playground. Realizing that one pizza costs more than their family’s monthly income, they begin to plot ways to earn more money – inadvertently beginning an adventure that will involve the entire city.
Seek and Hide, a short film directed by Manoj K. Nitharwal starring Mohan Agashe, Seema Biswas, Shalva Kinja Wadekar, Suleman, Khushboo Upadhyay, and Shabnam Sukhdev, won the Best Short film award.
Daughters of Mother India directed by Vibha Bakshi won the Best Documentary award. The documentary is a filmmaker’s journey through the aftermath of the horrific rape and murder of a 23 year old medical intern in Delhi on 16 December, 2012. For weeks mass protests filled the streets of India and the country witnessed ‘gender consciousness’ and extraordinary solidarity by the ordinary citizens – like never before.
Filmmakers like Vishal Bharadwaj, Hansal Mehta, Shonali Bose, Dev Benegal and actors including Koechlin, Agashe, Samrat Chakraborty and others walked the red carpet.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
