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

In Goutam Ghose’s Paar (1984), the director stages a crossing that is as brutal as it is symbolic — a man and a woman wading through a swelling river, herding pigs to survival. Decades later, Ghose finds himself drawn to a different kind of crossing. One that moves between two cities, two archives, and two kinds of memory.

In Kolkata, as Sheriff, he is working to restore fragile colonial-era High Court records. In Chennai, he is trying to salvage his own films, whose negatives are cracking with time, as the National Film Archive undertakes the restoration of the director’s oeuvre.