The Gas Station Attendant tells the intimate story of a father and a daughter through hard times
THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT (Karla Murthy, 2025)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
June 12-18
www.thegasstationattendant.com
www.dctvny.org
“The stories behind our smiling family are complicated and sometimes painful to tell,” Karla Murthy says in her new documentary, The Gas Station Attendant. “But isn’t everyone’s? It reminds me of the saying my cousin recently told me, while we were cooking, about all families having problems: ‘Everybody’s dosas have holes in them.’”
The Gas Station Attendant is a poignant, intimate tale of a family whose dosas have more than their share of holes. It’s about the immigrant experience and the search for the American dream, told by the daughter of a gentle man, H. N. Shantha Murthy, who spends his entire life trying to make things better for everyone around him despite meeting obstacles nearly every step of the way.
Murthy started recording her family on video when she was a little girl; later, as an adult, she began taping phone conversations with her father when he was forced to take a late-night job as a gas station attendant to pay the bills. During those talks, he shares details of the complicated, painful life he led, anchored by his deep love for his family.
He ran away from his home in India when he was ten, escaping horrific poverty, only to soon consider suicide. “I can still see myself as a boy,” he tells Karla. “I’m hiding here and there, not having food to eat for weeks. I used to sleep on the street, looking at the stars and moon, and always prayed: Someday, somehow, my life will change.” His life did change when, as a teen working at a hotel, he served a white couple from Texas who decided to sponsor him in America, paying for his education, and he became an engineer.
Following a mass layoff at Boeing, he struggled to earn a living, taking on a series of odd jobs, not wanting his family to experience any hardship. His first wife died too young, and he got remarried to a caring woman; both were Filipino, and he had two kids with each. Through it all, he grits his teeth and smiles, making friends wherever he goes — he and his second wife sold small gift items at trade shows around the country, something Karla sees for herself when she accompanies her father on one of those trips and he falls ill.
“Dad, how did you get up and keep going?” she thinks to herself.
The Emmy-nominated Murthy (The Place That Makes Us, Love, Jamie) wrote, directed, edited, and produced the eighty-three-minute film, incorporating archival footage, family photos and home movies, and numerous shots of empty gas stations, concerned for her father’s safety in what is a very dangerous job.
“And so here I am, reliving the past while trying to live in the present, wondering what it means to be a good father, a good daughter, a good mother,” Karla says.
Named Best Documentary Feature at the Nashville and San Diego Asian Film Festivals, The Gas Station Attendant will run June 12–18 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Murthy participating in four postscreening Q&As: June 12 at 7:00 with writer Mira Jacob, June 13 at 6:00 with composer and podcaster Jad Abumrad, June 14 at 5:00 with New York Taxi Workers Alliance founder Bhairavi Desai, moderated by executive producer and Basement Bhangra founder DJ Rekha (who makes a cameo in the film), and June 18 at 6:30 with Economic Hardship Reporting Project executive director Alissa Quart.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]