Hindi
Uday Shankar’s Kalpana to screen at Cannes
MUMBAI: Noted dancer Uday Shankar-directed Kalpana has been chosen to screen at the Cannes Film Festival this year as part of Cannes Classics.
The story of Kalpana revolves around a young dancer‘s dream of setting up an academy. It starred his wife Amala Shankar and him as leads and had the 17-year-old Padmini in her screen debut. The whole film was written at Uday Shankar‘s dance academy in Almorah that later became the hub of future artistes of India.
In 2009, the film process of digital restoration of Kalpana was taken up by NFAI in collaboration with France-based Thomson Foundation and in the next year was restored by the World Cinema Foundation of which Martin Scorsese happens to be a founding member.
The Cannes Classics 2012 programme includes 13 feature films, two shorts, a mini-concert and four documentaries. All these films will be world premieres. Some of the other films to be screened in this section are: Once Upon a time in America by Sergio Leone, Tess by Roman Polanski, Jaws by Steven Spielberg, The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, Lawrence of Arabia by David Lean and Runaway Train by Andrei Konchalovsky.
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.
