Kolkata: Thirty-four years after Kolkata Doordarshan apparently lost the original magnetic tapes of Mrinal Sen’s 12 Hindi short films, the director’s son has converted one of them — starring Girish Karnad and Aparna Sen — and shared it online on Monday.

Since he has low resolution VHS copies of nine to 10 of these shorts made in 1986-87, Kunal Sen has decided to convert them one by one to a format that can be viewed on YouTube.

Calling the series “Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas”, Sen said each episode was an independent short film that is around 22 minutes in length. The original magnetic tapes were in the “custody” of Kolkata Doordarshan. Kunal said, “Someone decided to reuse those tapes to record some other programme,” soon after the initial telecast.

“Since we were not living in Calcutta then, my father sent me a low resolution VHS copy of some of these short films,” he wrote on Facebook while posting the link. Kunal says the USP of this series is that most of the films dealt with “man-woman relationship, a subject that he rarely focused on”.

“After a Decade”, the pilot episode, was about the meeting of an estranged couple after 10 years. Others in the series include ‘Aajnabi’, ‘Shawl’, ‘Saalgira’, ‘Aajkal’, ‘Aina’, ‘Ravivar’, ‘Jit’, ‘Swayamvar’, ‘Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas’, and ‘Aparajit’.

Arunava Roy, assistant director (programmes) of Kolkata Doordarshan Kendra, said: “This is the first time I am hearing about this. We will try and see if the tapes are still available. The problem lies with the technology, which is not currently available with us for conversion of the magnetic tapes to the new format.”