Karla Murthy

Some films are reported. This one was recorded — on cassette tapes, over late-night landline calls between New York and a gas station in Texas.

Karla Murthy is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and a veteran public-television journalist. She grew up near Houston — of Indian and Filipino descent, her father an immigrant from India, her mother from the Philippines — studied classical piano at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and graduated from Oberlin College, where she met her husband, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad. She spent more than fifteen years in news, beginning under Bill Moyers and working as a producer, cameraperson and correspondent across PBS — Bill Moyers’ Journal, NOW, Need to Know, and PBS NewsHour. She works under her own banner, Greene Fort Productions, out of Brooklyn.

The Gas Station Attendant

The Gas Station Attendant is Murthy’s intimate portrait of her father, H. N. Shantha Murthy, who left an impoverished Indian village as a child, traveled for years looking for work, and reached the United States after a chance meeting with a Houston couple — eventually working the overnight shift behind a Texas gas-station counter. Living in New York, Murthy used to call him at the station to keep him company through the night, recording his memories of India onto cassette. Years later — after she’d married, had two sons of her own, and lost him — those tapes became the spine of a film, woven together with decades of family home movies shot on everything from Super 8 to 4K.

“My film is like a gateway for people to reflect on their own lives.”

Murthy edited it herself, in Premiere, in a tiny room in Brooklyn — the material was too personal, she says, to hand to anyone else. It premiered at Sheffield DocFest as the only American film in international competition, where it won a Special Mention from the jury, and went on to roughly eighteen festivals and screenings across the country, picking up Best Documentary Feature at Nashville and San Diego along the way. It began its U.S. theatrical run in June 2026 — and closed out the Austin Asian American Film Festival.

Our interview, on the carpet

Karla Murthy walks us through the festival and the making of the film — AAAFF 2026, AFS Cinema.

The festival run

• Sheffield DocFestWorld premiere · Special Mention, International Competition (the only U.S. film in competition)
• Nashville Film FestBest Documentary Feature
• San Diego Asian FFBest Documentary Feature
• AlsoHot Springs, DOC NYC, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, CAAMFest 2026 (Centerpiece) — ~18 festivals in all
• Co-productionITVS · Firelight Media · Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)

Find the film