Hindi
Persistence Resistance docufest goes to London
NEW DELHI: Documentaries from India, Banglaesh and the United kingdom will be screened in ‘Persistence Resistance 2011: Documentary Practices in India’, to be held in London from 1 to 8 November.
Organised by the Delhi-based Magic Lantern Foundation, the Festival will start with a focus on Indian documentary practice to create a more informed ground to explore its specific histories, styles and provocations. The aim is to explore further political and aesthetic affiliations across geographical locations and disciplines, according to the Foundation.
Filmmakers like Arun Khopkar, Deepa Dhanraj, Rahul Roy, Rajula and Shah Saba Dewan, from India, Yasmine Kabir from Bangladesh, as well as UK based filmmakers John Wyver, Mairead McClean, Mao Mollona, Margaret Dickinson and Simon Chambers will feature their films. They will be joined by, and be in conversations with, Alisa Lebow, Alpa Shah, Guilia Battaglia, Laura Bear, Lotte Hoek, Lucia King, Nicole Wolf, Partha Mitter, Radha D’Souza, Ravi Vasudevan, Ros Gray, Rosie Thomas, Stephen Hughes, Stewart Motha and Ziba Mir Hosseini.
The documentaries include Something Like a War by Deepa Dhanraj, Figures of Thought by Arun Khopkar and The Other Song by Saba Dewan.
There will be interactive sessions on ‘Indian Arts on Films’, ‘Documentary as Witnessing the Judiciary’, ‘Movements of everyday political/aesthetic practice – emergencies, revolutions and the paradoxes of involvement’, ‘Dialogues in Movement, Poetry and Song’, ‘Global Migrations, Labour and Activism’, ‘Urban Dreams: Public Cultures, Sexuality and Pleasure’ among others.
According to Gargi Sen who organises this festival every year in Delhi, Persistence Resistance in London would like to widen the spectrum of conversations between those films and their audiences, between filmmakers and viewers through a series of constructed conversations between academics and practitioners. It introduces archival and very recent works that have not been shown in London previously.
The festival is a collaborative effort between Magic Lantern and five academic institutions – Goldsmiths, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Westminster and Brunel University.
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.
