There is something near perfect about the timing of Karla Murthy’s new documentary, The Gas Station Attendant, even if unwittingly so. Right down to the quote from Moroccan American author, Laila Lalami, that it begins with: “Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration”. Karla’s sensitive portrait of her Indian migrant father, HN Shantha Murthy, and his lifelong chase of the American dream, arrives at a time when the immigrant issue has turned extremely fractious and distressing in the USA, threatening to rip apart the social fabric, making the film gain relevance.
The only American film to have its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest’s International Competition, it has, among others, Geeta Gandbhir as the executive producer. She is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker of Indian descent, whose latest film, The Perfect Neighbour, won the Directing Award in the US Documentary section of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this January. The migrant experience is central to Karla’s film but she frames it within the context of a family saga, more so a father-daughter dialogue of sorts. Taking us back and forth in time, she strings together home video footage—of thanksgiving dinners and trips and travels—with her recorded phone calls with Shantha and his many reminisces of India to map out his journey in life, all the way from India to America, from the poverty in Chennai to the hardships of Texas. How he ran away from home, travelling all over India in search of work, sleeping on the streets and how a chance encounter with a couple from Houston, Texas, paved the way for his passage to America.
Parallel to it runs Karla’s own story as a daughter of an Indian father and Filipino mother, who also left home at 18 to head to New York to take her own shot at life. As she herself puts it, moving away from home has been in her DNA. Married and raising two all-American boys of her own—who are the same age as her father when he ran away from home—she has her own battles about being and belonging to contend with. Where is she from and where is she going? Like father, like daughter. Shantha is at the core of the film and so is his relationship with Karla, at times to the exclusion of the rest. One would have liked to see more of his two Filipino wives and the other children as well as Karla’s own husband and kids but they seem to remain in the background, in a haze. Karla refers to her Indo-Filipino family, as big and complicated, but the complexities don’t get elaborated on. Only an odd line sticks out: “Family stories aren’t fairytales”. Purely as a documentary about family, it may not have the layers of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell but it makes up for it with its straightforward honesty and emotional acuity. It is, after all, about a daughter trying to understand her father who wasn’t quite a winner in life. If there is one consistent note in Shantha’s life, it is troubles and struggles; trying to work on several fronts—from jewellery store to gas station to restaurant to travel agency—without much success. Like countless migrants he is a quintessential survivor, carrying on with positivity despite the overarching strife. The underlying ethnic violence is implicit in Karla’s concern for Shantha working the nights at a gas station, where migrants have had a history of being easy targets and scapegoats. Her dad’s life has been about running and running. Where did it lead him? It’s the question topmost in her mind, now that he is no more.
Karla’s is a compassionate, caring and intimate look back at him, in which Shantha comes across as an extremely affectionate, warm, understanding and loving father. An admirable man that few in the wide world would have known but for his daughter’s film on him.