Hindi
Two films selected to participate at Paris Project
MUMBAI: Bikas Mishra‘s Chauranga (Four Colors) and Gurvinder Singh‘s The Fourth Direction have been selected to participate at the Paris Project, the co-production market of the Paris Cinema International Film Festival.
Among the other projects that have also been invited are Dror Shaul‘s Atomic Love, Flora Lau‘s Bends by, Flowing Stories by Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan, Margarita Manda‘s Forever, Nikola Ljuca‘s Humidity, I‘m not an American Actress by Chiara Malta, Land by Babak Jalali, Letters from War by Ivo Ferreira, Looking for Rohmer by Wang Chao, Ruined Heart! Another Love Story between a Criminal and a Whore by Khavn De La Cruz among a few others.
Organised within the framework of the festival, Paris Project is a development and financing platform for carefully selected worldwide feature projects aimed at French and European co-production.
The 2012 edition of Paris Project has been organised in partnership with the Hong Kong International Film Festival and HAF – Asian Film Financing Forum.
The Paris Cinema International Film Festival will be held in Paris from 2 to 4 July.
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.
