Hindi
Vasan Bala’s Peddlers to show at TIFF
MUMBAI: After garnering a fantastic response whilst competing at the International Critics Week at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival recently, Vasan Bala‘s Peddlers, starring Gulshan Deviah, Siddharth Menon, Kriti Malhotra and Nimrat Kaur, is all set to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year.
The film has been programmed for the City-to-City section with an aim to bring global cities to Toronto audiences where the focus will be on Mumbai this year.
Produced by Guneet Monga and Anurag Kashyap, Peddlers has definitely been creating an impact with the buzz around it in India and in the international festival circuits. Speaking about the film, Guneet Monga said, “TIFF is among world‘s top movie events, and is a gateway for international films into the North American region. We are very proud and honored to have not one, but four of our films including Peddlers at the festival this year. Eros International saw the potential in the film the moment they saw it and decided to back it up.”
Interestingly, Peddlers is Vasan Bala‘s directorial debut. Prior to Peddlers, Bala assisted Kashyap on Dev D, That Girl In Yellow Boots among others and partnered with him as the associate director of Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna that was filmed in India.
Talking about his first film, Bala said, “It‘s great that the film has been selected at Toronto after Cannes. Since the French press sighted a very American independent influence on the film, I am quite curious how it will be received here.”
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.
