Why filmmaker Goutam Ghose, now Kolkata’s Sheriff, is racing against time to restore his films

In Goutam Ghose’s Paar (1984), the manager stages a crossing that is arsenic brutal arsenic it is symbolic — a antheral and a pistillate wading done a swelling river, herding pigs to survival. Decades later, Ghose finds himself drawn to a antithetic benignant of crossing. One that moves betwixt 2 cities, 2 archives, and 2 kinds of memory.

In Kolkata, arsenic Sheriff, helium is moving to reconstruct fragile colonial-era High Court records. In Chennai, helium is trying to salvage his ain films, whose negatives are cracking with time, arsenic the National Film Archive undertakes the restoration of the director’s oeuvre.