Ishaan Nair, who got his acting break as Varun Verma, a happy, pudgy teenager, in his aunt Mira Nair's hit film Monsoon Wedding [Images], is more focused on writing and directing films.

He says he discovered cinema in a sack of old videos sent to him by an uncle over a decade ago. From old Hollywood to Communist China he experienced a world of film that had been entirely unknown, he says.

"The intoxication of a lonely summer that was filled by the rewinding of films with translations running at the bottom has stuck with me since," he continues.

After having completed four years of film at School of Visual Arts in New York, he returned to India "to tell stories contrary to the majority of films being churned out of Indian cinema."

As for his acting career, he says, he life in front of the lens was not half as enticing as one behind it.

Last week, he brought to the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival a 43-minute-long film called Guroor. It marks his directorial debut. It was also his thesis movie.

The film is about the problems narcissism causes in a family. The embittered and eldest of the three sisters in a family weaves a web of lies and black magic within which the three sisters become increasingly entangled.

"Though it deals with family ties, the silence, the ego and the envy that often sever them, it remains at its core a film about vanity," Nair says. "Is it truly a sin? Is it the driving force for confidence and subsequent happiness? Does love feed vanity? Or does it demolish it?"

He is working on turning the short film into a 100-minute feature.