Hindi
PVR picks up Ritesh Batra’s ‘The Sense of an Ending’ for India
MUMBAI: FilmNation Entertainment, which holds the worldwide rights of Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending, has completed international sales for the movie at Berlin’s European Film Market.
In major deals across various territories, PVR has acquired the India rights of the film from FilmNation Entertainment.
On the other hand, Sony has acquired Latin America and Eastern Europe; Wild Bunch has closed France, Germany, Italy and Spain; Studiocanal took the UK; and Fox International Channels has acquired Pan-Asian pay TV rights.
In other deals, Longride (Japan), Roadshow (Australia), Svensk (Scandinavia), Mediasoft (South Korea), and Lumiere (Benelux) have picked up the drama that stars the Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent along with Harriet Walter, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery and Charlotte Rampling.
Among other territories closed are Greece (Spentzos), Israel (Lev), the Middle East (Italia), Portugal (Lusomundo),Switzerland (Frenetic), Turkey (Aqua), Hong Kong (Edko), India (PVR), Indonesia (Prima Cinema), Singapore (Shaw Renters) and South Africa (Ster Kinekor).
The movie stars Broadbent as a recluse who is forced to face the devastating legacy of his first love and revise his understanding of his own nature.
The film is co-financed by BBC Films and produced by Origin Pictures.
Batra says, “It’s been a real pleasure to adapt Julian Barnes’s great novel to the screen, I loved working with the writer Nick Payne and with production. These are exciting times as the film has sold all over the World, I do believe that it is a matter of time before we make Indian stories with great Indian actors that will travel more than or as much as English language cinema does.”
Batra’s previous film, the critically acclaimed hit The Lunchbox, starring Irrfan Khan, and Nimrat Kaur, was BAFTA nominated and won the Viewers’ Choice Award at the 2014 Cannes Festival.
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.
