Karla Murthy: My film is about reimagining the American dream

There were these phone conversations that I had with my father recorded over 20 years ago. I knew that they were special. Those were stories I had heard my whole life. The calls were like a project to keep him company in the middle of the night. But when he started telling these stories again, in the context of a gas station, all of a sudden, they started to mean something different to me.

Then, of course, his passing made me want to hear his voice again and brought me back to those tapes. I was finishing my first film, which is about someone else's home. I was covering families that felt very rooted in one place and went back generations. But I didn't have that same connection to any place. I also kept thinking about what it would mean for my kids. So some of it was wanting to share his story with them. It was a lot of different things that all happened at once that brought me to this moment where I felt ready to make this film. I was working on it on my own as almost like a therapeutic, cathartic art project and then it just became this larger film.

I loved its connection to India and South Asia. I hadn't worked on a film with a South Asian theme so that really drew me to it. I think the father-daughter story really spoke to me, but also the universality of it, looking at the immigrant experience. I think there's so much in this film that resonates regardless of your personal circumstances. I just loved Karla’s creative vision. From the get-go it was very clear that she wanted to do something different, she really wanted to experiment with the form and how to tell this story and that, to me, was super exciting as a producer.

I had worked in news documentaries for over 10 years. The practice of that informs how I work and helps me step back from myself. I was doing a lot of writing too and working with other people. It was crucial for me to have a really strong editorial team for this film because it was so personal. They always say that it takes a village to make a film and I feel like when you're doing a personal film, that's even more important. People that can keep me in check so that it doesn't become all inside my own head and over-emotional. We had screenings with people who didn't know anything about me, which was crucial because you start to fill in the gaps. But it was taxing emotionally, to be sitting in this space for this long, to be in this state of grief for the amount of time that it took me to finish the film.

Definitely. There were things that I discovered about myself and about my dad from making this film. For instance, my dad changed jobs many times and it was very frustrating growing up with that, wanting him to just stick with one thing. In retelling the story of him having to live on the streets, it started to make sense to me why he was doing that. It was like a state of survival. You don't stay in one place too long, you are always trying to look for the next thing. That is how he survived as a child.

KM: For me it was always complicated because I'm half Filipino, too, and so I feel like I live in this space where I'm never Indian enough, I'm never Filipino enough, and now in this country, sometimes I don't feel American enough. I just yearned to feel rooted in one place. Telling family stories is also a way of parenting, it is a way to give children a sense of resilience, identity and security. Telling the hard stories too, not just fairy tales. Those are the stories that root us and give us a sense of identity.

RP: In America we talk about immigrants having value because of the work that we do, especially South Asians. It's like we're the model minority. This film flips that on its head. Karla talks a lot about the invisible work, the intimate stranger. Somebody you come in contact with every day but you may not know their names. They work at the gas station, they drive a taxi. Immigrant populations are not one thing and we're not defined so much by what we do. We're defined by who we are and it can be a complicated legacy. The film is not necessarily about someone's success, but it's just about them as humans, and it's about a relationship and a family, and so I think it subverts a lot of that South Asian model minority.

It was a lot about throwing out the rules and coming up with new ones. Coming from a news background, this was completely a 180 in terms of form. So much of it was this home movie that was never meant to be in a feature film. I wanted to just lean into the messiness of that footage and edit more for emotion, as opposed to continuity. With the phone calls I tried many different things. I was concerned about what I am going to show while we're listening to these phone calls. The idea that I had was that it would be from my perspective in Brooklyn, listening to those calls from Texas and seeing these gas stations here. I wanted to have this sense of me drifting off to sleep, listening to these stories and imagining him, his childhood in India and to have this kind of otherworldly feeling, and then the moments where we snap back into reality.

Then there was the point of telling. Unlike point of view, point of telling is where you are in the story that you're relating. I thought a lot about where I am in the story and how is that going to reflect the style of the editing and the cutting? I wanted it to have a visual diary feel. The point of telling is revealed in the film when you see this box of tapes, and then you realize everything has happened in the past, and I'm rehashing it and journaling about it. There’s no music from that point on because music is like memories and everything present day is silent. There are things I gave myself to give it some sort of form and to still make it feel stream of consciousness, while following a three-act emotional structure.

KM: It is such a crazy, confusing time to be alive. We have a mayor who looks like my family. At the same time there’s all this anti-immigration sentiment. My film is about reimagining what the American dream is and what it meant for my father. One of the main things that I want people to come away with is to remember the acts of kindness, to give each other some grace and to remember the things that bind us and our shared humanity. We’re all human beings, we're all in this together.

RP: There are these parallel universes that we're existing in, especially as people of colour. Immigrant populations are vulnerable populations. In places like New York or Los Angeles you see what it means to have community, you see what it means to have leadership that looks like us. Then you look at the larger country and it feels so different. It's something that I struggle with on a daily basis. How is it possible to live in a place where these two extremes coexist?

KM: It feels very tenuous when you see people being dragged out of their homes and detained and on the news and deported. It’s probably the most in my life that I've felt insecure about where I am and who I am, and about the safety of my family. Mamdani is elected; it's a great experiment, this country but it's also very scary and fragile.

RP: For me too it's called into question, what it means to identify as an American. I don't know if I have an answer to that. It's very complicated.

KM: I wanted to show a different version of the South too. In America there are not as many immigrant stories that are rooted in the South and a lot of people don't realize that parts of Texas are incredibly diverse.

RP: For me a project has to resonate in some way to some part of my identity or is to do with something that I really care about. A lot of it is to do with team. What do they want to do with the film? Thematically, I do gravitate towards things beyond just South Asian culture, immigration, but, you know, I'm very interested in those things, too.

KM: I have only gone with my father. I've been three times. My sister's actually in Mysore right now. She goes back quite often. But the last time I was there was a year before my father died. I want to go back again, I want to bring my kids and I want to explore but I just haven't had the opportunity yet.

RP: I haven't been since 2011. I used to go more frequently before that. I actually lived in Bombay for a few years, right out of college and grew up in New Delhi for a little bit. I too have a little kid and I keep thinking about the right time to take her, and would love to go sometime soon, but it feels so far now, when you have a kid.

Right now I can't imagine taking on another personal film. This took so much out of me. But definitely my husband and I, we've thought about collaborating together on something. It's that same need, to feel a sense of identity. So, you never know.