Nish Saran, a precocious documentarian while a film student at Harvard, died in an April 2002 automobile accident in his home city of New Delhi. He was 26. His friends and colleagues have arranged a memorial tribute on Tuesday, May 6, at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. Showing will be two of Saran’s Harvard-made films, Fifty Fifty (1998) and Summer in My Veins (1999). Both are blatantly oedipal love stories that show off Saran’s clever, camera-charismatic mother, Minna Saran; both conclude with Minna in the frame learning something of monumental personal significance: how will she react?

In Fifty Fifty, the youthful mom celebrates her 50th birthday with fearsome worry about a lump in her breast. The big scene: Minna on the phone with her doctor, finding out whether the lump is cancerous. In Summer in My Veins, Nish Saran, a camera on his shoulder, comes out to his mother, and what is captured is her up-and-down-the-scales emotions (yes, she’s a drama queen) as she realizes her son is gay.

Says Irene Lusztig, a Reconstruction filmmaker who was one of Saran’s close friends at Harvard: " Summer in My Veins screened in India to great acclaim, and, as one of the very few openly gay public figures, Nish attained a kind of celebrity in Delhi circles, which he turned around and used in service of gay activism. He made a significant difference in a dialogue complicated by the fact that homosexuality is still a criminal offense in India. "