Hindi
‘Zubaan’ to open Busan International Film Festival
NEW DELHI: Indian film Zubaan by Mizez Singh will be the inaugural film at this year’s 20th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), which will have a major Indian presence.
Director Anurag Kashyap, known for bold films over the last decade, is a member of the New Currents Asian film competition jury at the Festival.
BIFF’s annual Korean cinema Award will be given to Berlinale Panorama curator Wieland Speck, for his contribution to introducing Korean cinema worldwide.
The New Currents competition section will highlight eight titles from 10 countries. The jury is headed by multi-talented Taiwanese actress, director and screenwriter, Sylvia Chang.
Chinese film Mountain Cry by Larry Yang will be the closing film at the Festival, which is being held from 1 – 10 October.
The festival will have 304 films from 75 countries, including 94 world premieres and 27 international premieres.
Addressing a press meet earlier this week, Festival co-director Lee Yong-kwan said, “Zubaan is a film that is able to highlight the past twenty years of BIFF as a festival that has discovered a number of new Asian directors and helped lift them to world class. Zubaan also demonstrates the current transition and the future of Indian cinema that the world has recently begun paying attention to.”
This is the second time an Indian film will be opening the festival as Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Bengali film Uttara aka The Wrestlers had been the opening film in 2000.
Zubaan, which has been produced by Guneet Monga, tells the story of a young folk musician named Dilsher who moves from Punjab to find success in the big city, before proceeding to deal with its fallouts. It stars Vicky Kaushal with Sarah-Jane Dias, and Raaghav Chanana.
Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh starring Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar will also have its world premiere at the festival as part of ‘A Window On Asian Cinema’ section. The film is based on the life of Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, a professor at Aligarh Muslim University who was fired from his position on the basis of his sexual orientation.
This section has several other films from India. They include Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar (under its international title Guilty), a crime drama based on the infamous Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj double murder case that took place in Noida seven years ago. The film stars Irrfan Khan, Neeraj Kabi and Konkona Sen Sharma.
Films like Masaan (which won two awards at Cannes in May this year) and Mani Rathnam’s O Kadhal Kanmani also feature in this section.
Meanwhile, the Salman Khan starrer Bajrangi Bhaijaan will be screened in the festival’s ‘Open Cinema’ section.
Other Indian films in the ‘A Window on Asian Cinema’ are: Kothanodi directed by Bhaskar Hazarika (Assamese); Orange Candy directed by Biju Viswanath (Tamil) and Peace Havendirected by Suman Ghosh (Bengali).
The New Currents section will screen Radio Set directed by Hari Viswanath (Tamil).
The Wide Angle section will have two films: Jai Ho directed by Umesh Aggarwal (English/Hindi) on the life and work of living music maestro A R Rahman and Fireflies in the Abyss directed by Chandrasekhar Reddy (Indo-British) (Hindi, Khasi, Garo).
The jury will award $30,000 prizes to two winners of the New Currents competition at the festival’s closing ceremony on 10 October.
New Currents is open to Asian films by first-or second-time directors. Former winners include China’s Jia Zhangke (Pick Pocket, 1998), Korea’s Park Chan-wook (Jealousy is My Middle Name, 2002), and Thailand’s Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town, 2007).
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.
