Hindi
Sequel of ABCD being worked on; remake of Special 26 on cards
MUMBAI: There‘s something more about the releases of last week viz ABCD – Any Body Can Dance and Special26 — one film is going to have a sequel and the other could be remade in several languages.
First let‘s talk of the sequel.
Buoyed by the positive response that ABCD – Any Body Can Dance has been receiving, producers UTV has roped in Remo D‘Souza once again to work on the sequel of the film.
Confirming the same, Remo said, “Though talks of the sequel were being heard in the corridors of filmdom for quite some time, it is now that UTV has whole-heartedly backed my vision. I‘m very much excited to have been offered two more films under the banner. One of them is the sequel of ABCD on which I‘m working on right now.”
The film will retain the cast of ABCD with a few fresh additions.
Commented Disney UTV Studios managing director Siddharth Roy Kapur, “ABCD showcases Remo‘s ability to thrill and entertain his audience while at the same time he has sensitively handled emotion and drama. Having worked with a team of superb dancers, he has brought out the actor in each one of them. We‘re thrilled to be continuing our association with him.”
For Special 26, filmmakers down south and the east have approached the makers of the film for the remaking rights in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Bengali.
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.
