While traveling across america with his family visiting from India, Nish Saran struggles to come out to them as a gay man. Adding to his stress are the impending results of an HIV test, made all the more complicated by an unsafe encounter he has had with an HIV-positive man. Saran explores the unusual dynamics of secrecy and revelation, love and cruelty that mark this very close family. Every achingly personal moment—including coming out to his mother and getting his test results—is caught on tape. What results is a work that pushes personal documentary to its limits, where the very life of the maker is at stake in the outcome of the piece.

In this loving portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, Minna, Saran chronicles the days surrounding her fiftieth birthday party. Amidst these festivities, Minna undergoes a biopsy on her breast. Saran intimately chronicles his mother’s conflicted feelings about both growing older and facing her own mortality while her extended family offers their own unique brand of support.