Hindi
UFO announces Digital Film Fest
NEW DELHI: New and amateur filmmakers will get an opportunity to showcase their talent in the upcoming digital film festival — UFO 0110 International Digital Film Festival – which is introducing a contest to promote new talent and fresh ideas in the industry.
The festival will be organised from 23 February to 1 March at Siri Fort Auditorium in New Delhi.
Christened as ‘Film in 6 Days‘, the competition will present a challenge to young filmmakers to direct a short film in a brief span of six days. To facilitate this process and help the participants bring their imagination into life, the organisers will provide all the logistical support to them.
‘Film in six days‘ competition will select six to 10 teams (consisting of director, director of production, and editor) on the basis of their past experience and interviews. The selected candidates will be given a topic by the festival organisers to make a film within six days. These films then will be reviewed by a jury comprising senior people from film fraternity who will select winner will be rewarded with prize money/editing software/equipment.
Festival Director and Ekaa Films founder Madhureeta Anand said, “The six-day competition is an integral and important part of the UFO 0110 International digital Film Festival. It is our way of seeing that budding filmmakers get a chance to make films that on the one hand can be a showcase of their work and on the other hand can be learning experience. For us at the film festival it‘s our way of planting seeds. We hope that these very filmmakers will, in the future, send in films to the festival and add to the viewing experience and quality of the festival.”
Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra, Jury member of the last IDFF feels “Digital format of filmmaking is an amazing format that gives you the freedom to shoot things, make a movie, put forth your viewpoint about an issue/agenda etc while overcoming the constraints of inadequate funding or networking etc. It is a wonderful medium for independent voices and certainly more and more people are now open to the idea of digital film making.”
“As a jury member, I have very fond memories of the festival. Even the quality of films churned out by amateur filmmakers/directors such as students or those coming from non- film industry background is very exciting. The technique used by one filmmaker/story teller inadvertently varies with that used by another and this is the surprising element that one comes across fests such as IDFF. Festival like IDFF should be promoted so that maximum talent can be discovered.”
The 0110 International Digital Film Festival is an annual event showcasing cutting edge digital films from around the world. The mission is to take the digital art and film movement forward and provide fresh and innovative content to the viewers and create a space for new styles of form and content that can become the resource pool for filmmakers in South Asia and the rest of the world. It is the only film festival in India that travels to 11 cities.
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.
