Hindi
Subhash Ghai opens 10th Third Eye Asian Film Festival
MUMBAI: Filmmaker Subhash Ghai inaugurated the 10th Third Eye Asian Film Festival yesterday at the Ravindra Natya Mandir Complex, Prabhadevi, Mumbai.
The opening ceremony saw the ‘Asian Film Culture Award‘ bestowed on noted Afghani filmmaker Siddiq Barmak. Barmak‘s film Osama will be screened tonight.
The award presentation was followed by the screening of the festival‘s opening Film, 11 Flowers, directed by Chinese director Xioanshuai Wang.
Some of the other important films to be screened at the festival are Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Distant, Italo Spinelli‘s Gangor, Rajesh Pinjani‘s Babu Band Bajaa and Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. Iranian filmmaker Monir Qeidi‘s On the Way to Villa will also be screened at the Festival.
The week-long festival has been dedicated to Dev Anand who passed away in London on 3 December. Incidentally, he had inaugurated the first edition of the festival in 2002.
The festival will close on 29 December with the screening of Ketan Mehta‘s as yet unreleased film Rang Rasiya.
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.
