Hindi
The Lunchbox wins more international awards
NEW DELHI: The Lunchbox has won the highest number of awards with three awards – Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Outstanding Achievement for star Irrfan Khan – at the 56 Asia-Pacific Film Festival held in Macau.
Kore-Eda’s Like Father, Like Son won the two top awards of Best Picture and Best Director.
Hong Kong producer Nansun ShiI served as the head of the jury. She was joined by China’s Zhang Zhao, Malaysia’s Afdlin ShaukiI, Taiwan’s Sylvia Chang and South Korea’s Hur Jin-ho.
Meanwhile, The Lunchbox has also won two awards at the 10th Dubai International Film Festival held in the Madinat Arena of the Madinat Jumeirah resort: Irrfan Khan received Best Actor for his role portraying the role of a lonely man nearing retirement. Director Ritesh Batra shared the Special Mention for his screenplay with Souleymane Démé for his role in Grigris, a France-Chad co-production.
The best director went to India’s Sandeep Ray for Thin Arms in the Muhr AsiaAfrica Shorts competition.
The president of the AsiaAfrica Feature jury was Indian film-maker Shekhar Kapur. Its members include Lebanese actress Carole Abboud and cinematographer Tareq El-Telmissany. Kapur thanked his five-member jury, saying “We started with complete disagreement but within two or three hours ended in complete agreement. So we did our job well.”
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.
