Niraj Nair and Mark Chan Keep Finding the Grief Underneath the Bravado

Both short films Niraj Nair has made with writer-director Mark Chan involve a moment where a character is forced to say something true in a context designed to suppress it. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the premise.

In Parampara, Nair plays Son, a high school senior who announces to his father that he’s been accepted to Stanford Medical School. In most Asian-household narratives, that’s the triumph. Here, it’s the source of the conflict. Father responds with disappointment, shame, and anger: Son has failed to live up to his pre-ordained purpose of becoming an artist. The film’s gut-punch comes later, when we learn that Father himself once dreamed of becoming a surgeon before his own father pressured him into a career in the arts. The cultural dogmatism he’s imposing is the same one that was imposed on him. He’s passing down the wound and calling it expectation.

Nair plays the whole film in the receiver position. Son’s job isn’t to argue back, at least not until the film earns that moment. It’s to absorb the full weight of paternal authority while the audience watches it land. That kind of restraint, not deflating the scene but not fighting it either, is technical work that most performers rush past. The temptation when your scene partner is delivering the heavy artillery is to show that you’re being affected. Nair does something harder. He shows Son processing something he doesn’t yet have language for, the specific confusion of someone whose best achievement isn’t good enough and who can’t immediately explain why that’s wrong.

Hayden’s Bars is technically more demanding and tonally miles away. The premise is street interview meets Shakespeare: a cameraman with a social media interviewer catches three friends on a night out, and Hayden, the character Nair plays, starts the encounter as exactly what he looks like. A regular guy in full frat-bro mode, out with his friends, not looking for a conversation. Then someone mentions the friend who died. And Hayden delivers a contemporary rendering of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” that doesn’t sound like theater at all. It sounds like someone who actually needs to ask that question right now, on this street, with his friends roughhousing behind him like the whole thing isn’t happening.

That tonal shift is the entire film. If it doesn’t land, if it reads as a clever concept rather than a genuine emotional rupture, there’s no movie. What Nair does is keep the thought alive without any of the theatrical apparatus that usually makes Shakespeare feel like a performance. No elevation, no distance, no signal that we’re in “the speech now.” Just the words, delivered by someone who means them in a body that still feels like it’s out for the night.

Then Hayden snaps back. The frat-bro veneer reassembles, his friends drag him back into the current, and they stumble off toward the next club. The grief surfaces and submerges in the same breath. That’s the actual observation at the heart of the film: that people carry this stuff around without it being visible most of the time, and it only shows when something breaks the surface unexpectedly. Nair trusts the film enough to let that observation be quiet. He doesn’t underline it.

Chan’s direction on both films is economical in a way that forces the performances to carry more weight. There’s no score padding the emotional beats, no stylistic flash redirecting your attention. What you’re watching is two actors in a room, or three people on a street, and what they’re doing with their faces and bodies and the silences between their lines. For that kind of filmmaking to work, the actors have to be doing something real. In both cases, Nair is.

He’s described his job as finding “where the character and I can converge,” then stretching his own experience and imagination to give the character’s feelings clarity and justice. Both films show what that looks like in practice: not transformation, not disappearing into a role, but a specific and disciplined meeting between the actor’s own humanity and the character’s. In Parampara, it’s the quiet devastation of not being enough. In Hayden’s Bars, it’s the grief that lives underneath the bravado. Neither is easy to play with this much specificity. Both land.