Hindi
‘Piku,’ ‘Dum Laga Ke Haisha,’ ‘Mardaani’ screened at Indian Film Festival Japan
MUMBAI: Yash Raj Films’ productions Mardaani and Dum Laga Ke Haisha along with MSM Motion Pictures’ Piku, which is co-produced by Saraswati Entertainment and Rising Sun Films and distributed by YRF are being showcased at the Indian Film Festival Japan.
The festival is being held from 9 – 23 October, 2015.
This year, the Indian Film Festival Japan festival opened with a screening of Piku on 9 October. The film starring Amitabh Bachchan, Irrfan Khan and Deepika Padukone, has already been screened at Indian Film Festivals in Russia and Australia.
Dum Laga Ke Haisha director Sharat Katariya attended the screening of his film at the festival in Japan on 10 October.
YRF’s Mardaani starring Rani Mukerji will be screened later this week.
YRF vice president of international operations Avtar Panesar said, “It has always been our endeavour at YRF to take Indian cinema to the widest possible audience. It’s heart-warming to see native audiences connect with our films through festivals, which eventually lead to commercial releases. Japan is a very vibrant market and we hope to build on the earlier successes we have had with Jab Tak Hai Jaan andEk Tha Tiger.”
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.
