Karla Murthy’s ‘The Gas Station Attendant’ is the deeply personal tale of how a journey shaped a family and how a boy’s story continues to ripple through each new generation. It is a love letter to a dad who shared his experience through late-night phone conversations with his daughter as he manned a gas station until the wee small hours, and a meditation on the reality faced by migrants who strive to overcome a host of economic barriers to inclusion, often with limited success.
Karla Murthy’s emotional, heartfelt and breathtakingly honest documentary, The Gas Station Attendant, opens with a quote from novelist Laila Lalami, “Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.” In our modern world of division, protectionism, and nationalism, many believe their identity is fixed and unchangeable. How often have you heard statements like, “I’m a true American, unlike those coming here”, or “Our Britishness must be protected at all costs.” My response to these statements is to ask, “Were your ancestors true Americans when they arrived from Europe and beyond?” Or “Where did Britishness start? Was it with the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the French, the Celts or the Vikings?” As Lalami states, migration is the story of our human race, from the first people to the present day. Our national identities are not fixed in time; they are constantly evolving and changing, just as they have always been.
Karla Murthy’s documentary is about that evolution and the story of one family’s journey, her own. The story starts in India and the Philippines. Karla’s dad, H. N. Shantha Murthy, was born in 1939, just eight years before Indian independence, and the great partition that changed a nation, while her mum was born into the beauty and poverty of the Philippines. As young adults, her mother and father would bring their stories to Missouri City, Texas, and begin raising a family in a country they hoped would offer success, freedom, and wealth. However, tragedy would strike when Karla’s mum died from a tumour at a young age. Shantha would remarry years later, and the family would continue to grow, as Karla began to document family life through VHS tapes, audio recordings, pictures, and later, mobile footage.
The Gas Station Attendant is the deeply personal tale of how a journey shaped a family and how a boy’s story continues to ripple through each new generation. It is a love letter to a dad who shared his experience through late-night phone conversations with his daughter as he manned a gas station until the wee small hours, and a meditation on the reality faced by migrants who strive to overcome a host of economic barriers to inclusion, often with limited success.
Murthy’s documentary brings together an extensive archive of home videos from her childhood, recorded telephone conversations, road trips shot on an iPhone, and stock footage to not only tell her dad’s story but to explore her own feelings and emotions following his death. She asks poignantly whether we become so caught up in our own lives as we grow that we forget to talk and truly listen to the experiences that shaped our parents and, ultimately, ourselves.
Listening to her father recount his story through those recorded conversations is profoundly moving, from his choice to leave his dad at the age of ten and take to the streets of India in the hope of work to his young teens spent serving in hotels, restaurants and shops before his miraculous journey to America following a random meeting with two hotel guests who would sponsor his move. Every word in his lived experience builds our understanding of the loving man and the dutiful father he would become. Yet while America offered H. N. Shantha Murthy escape, the reality of the move was always a mix of darkness and light. Light in the family he cherished, the community of friends and colleagues he built, and his eternal belief that something better was always ‘just around the corner’. But there was darkness in the loss of his first wife at such a young age, the debts that threatened to sink him and the jobs that dried up in the mirage of the American dream.
Murthy’s profoundly emotional and honest documentary explores the most human of journeys —migration —while encouraging us to reflect on the importance of the stories that shape and build our sense of identity and belonging as we navigate the winding road that is life. Perhaps most importantly, The Gas Station Attendant also urges us to sit down with our parents or those we love, if we still can, and ask something we often miss as we busily navigate our lives: “Tell me your story…”
The Gas Station Attendant premiered at Sheffield DocFest and is awaiting a UK-wide release date.
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