Hindi
Two foreign outfits to share production costs of Sunrise
MUMBAI: Augustus Film of Netherlands and Endorphine Productions, Germany will come together to share the production costs of Partho Sen-Gupta’s Sunrise (Arunoday) with Independent Movies, Mumbai and NFDC.
The film tells the story of Joshi, an embittered Mumbai cop who has been searching for his missing daughter for ten years since she disappeared one day after school.
Joshi’s quest is used to reveal the horror of child trafficking and exploitation in India, a taboo subject which nonetheless affects a huge number of the children in the world’s most populous democracy, a country where lives are often cheap.
“It’s good for me now as a large burden has been removed from my shoulders and I have to only stick to the creative process of filmmaking. NFDC’s backing the film also gave the impetus that we were waiting for. But I think that the 156 crowd-funders are the real heroes of the film project,”said Sengupta.
Sengupta had, in the recent past, collected $21, 000 by crowd funding from the website indiegogo.com for Sunrise.
The film, featuring Adil Hussain (of Life of Pi fame) and Tannishtha Chatterjee (of Brick Lane fame), is expected to go on the floors early next year.
The co-production deals were finalised at Marche du Films at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival. The film will now be an Indo-German-Dutch co-production with a mixed international crew.
Earlier, Sengupta had written and directed films like Shakti Timeless, Sound Check, Hava Aney Dey and Saturday Night in Bombay.
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.
