Dustin Tan's The Chair is about the effort to understand another person, and the shame that so often sabotages it. Two men, one object, and the distance between wanting to be understood and letting yourself understand. One of them has made something and cannot fully grasp what he's made; the other grasps it completely but could never make it himself.  A creator, his creation, and a stranger who understands that creation better than its own author does.

Warren's character is proud, reaching openly to bring the other man into a knowledge he can only offer by example. The maker is all composure, performing an indifference, even a judgment, that at least fools himself. Tan reminds us that the questions that consume people most are often the ones chased in private and waved off in public. It's fitting, then, that he shoots on a DV cam — a format built for the home movie, for the private self the camcorder was always meant to hold. That domestic, slightly furtive grain lends the texture of something not quite meant to be witnessed.

What The Chair leaves you with is the sense that we're all, privately, a little more curious than we show — and that the things we make have a way of exposing exactly that.