Hindi
Shankar Mohan becomes Film Festivals director
NEW DELHI: International Film Festival of India director Shankar Mohan has taken up an additional role. Mohan is now the director of the Directorate of Film Festivals.
Mohan takes over from Rajeev Kumar Jain who has been moved to Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s film wing.
A professional filmmaker, Mohan has been part of the DFF for 24 years. While holding charge as joint director in DFF, Mohan had been made director of the annual IFFI which is held in Goa in November every year.
He also held concurrent charge as director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata for two years from 2010, and had for one year also been Festival Director for the Mumbai International Film Festivals for Shorts, Documentaries and Animation films organised by the Films Division every alternate year.
Early in 2012, Mohan had sought voluntary retirement, serving three months’ notice but had later been convinced to withdraw this letter.
Mohan, then joint director in the Director of Film Festivals, had been made IFFI director in 2011 following a high-level report to then Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni suggesting some changes to improve the status of IFFI and make it of international standard.
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.
