The Gas Station Attendant

Best Documentary Feature, 2025 Nashville Film Festival
Grand Jury Special Mention, 2025 Sheffield DocFest

The gas station attendant is director Karla Murthy’s father, and his job is a side gig in the middle of the Texan night. It’s also the latest stop on a seemingly minor but utterly incredible life trajectory. He’s a serial entrepreneur, who was once homeless in the streets of Bangalore, who found himself serendipitously in Texas, and then as a Boeing engineer, a restaurateur and trade show salesman, with varying degrees of non-success. Along the way, he made slightly-more-than-superficial friendships everywhere he went, never quite taking root anywhere.

Murthy’s touch in this documentary feature is its motive force. Mixing home movies and late-night phone calls with her father while he worked, THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT explores the multiple vantage points of their complicated relationship–the ease of his love, their blended Filipino-Indian family, the lore of his immigration, his multiple small businesses and failures, the constant threat of not making money–and all of it keeps going, because the gas station attendant was never going to be a self-made man but was always effortlessly self-making.

– Cheyenne Paiva