Karla Murthy’s debut feature is one of those rare documentaries that justifies the entire medium. Her father, H. N. Shantha Murthy, left his impoverished village in India as a child, spent years in motion, married a Filipino immigrant, raised a family, and eventually ended up working the night shift at a gas station in Arkansas. Rather than construct a conventional portrait, Murthy built her film from the inside out — weaving together decades of home movies with phone calls she recorded during those night shifts, her voice off-camera, his coming through the line with the sound of late traffic behind him.
What emerges is something more complicated than a tribute and more generous than a reckoning. The film holds the full weight of a difficult man — his restlessness, his relocated ambitions, the financial wreckage, the strained affections — while never losing sight of the love that made her want to make it in the first place. It’s candid and tender in the same breath, and the formal choices (those phone calls; the way certain home-movie images recur, accumulating meaning) are quietly brilliant. Among the films we saw here, it was the one that stayed.
“This love letter to the director’s father is an intimate and sincere portrait of both a family and U.S. society. The film is delicately crafted with care, creativity, and sensibility.” Sheffield DocFest International Competition Jury, 2025