POV Season 39 Continues with THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT Reframing the American Dream Through a Father-Daughter Story
Press Release
Premieres Monday, August 3, 2026 on PBS Television Nationwide and Streaming on PBS.org and the PBS App Until October 3, 2026
Download Press Photos • #GasStationAttendantFilmPBS
Brooklyn, N.Y. – July 23, 2026 — POV continues its 39th season with “The Gas Station Attendant,” directed by Karla Murthy (The Place That Makes Us) and produced by Murthy and POV Alum Rajal Pitroda (How To Have An American Baby). A co-presentation with CAAM, the deeply personal documentary explores migration, identity and the complexities of family through decades of home movies and recorded phone conversations tracing Murthy’s father’s unlikely journey from the streets of India to building a life in America.
Praised by Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times as “engrossing because of the rich tapestry of sources she draws on," “The Gas Station Attendant” will make its national broadcast premiere on POV on PBS Television on Monday, August 3, 2026 at 10pm/9C (check local listings), and will be available to stream until October 3, 2026. POV is America's longest-running nonfiction series, bringing award-winning independent documentaries and their creators to audiences for nearly four decades.
Drawing from years of family archives, Murthy traces her father H. N. Shantha Murthy's hard-won journey from the streets of India to working at a gas station in Texas as he sought to build a life in America. Rather than telling a familiar story of achieving the American Dream, “The Gas Station Attendant”offers a more nuanced portrait of the immigration experience—one that explores sacrifice, aspiration and the pursuit of a meaningful life on one's own terms. Through her family’s archival footage, Murthy reveals her father not as a symbol of the immigration experience, but as a fully realized person whose dreams, disappointments and resilience reflect the complexities of family and belonging.
As Murthy reflects on her own experiences as the daughter of immigrants and, later, as a mother herself, the film becomes both an exploration of intergenerational expectations, identity and the reckoning of a complicated father-daughter relationship shaped by love, financial hardship and the grief of an unfinished goodbye. The result is a moving portrait of one family’s story that resonates far beyond it.
“This film grew from a longing to understand my father's life and to return to the stories I heard throughout my childhood about his journey to America,” said Karla Murthy, director of The Gas Station Attendant. “As an adult searching for my own path, and now as a mother, I found myself listening to those stories in an entirely new way, trying to understand not only where he came from, but how his journey continues to shape my own.
“I wanted to tell an immigrant story that moves beyond familiar narratives of resilience or success to reveal a full human life—one defined by dreams, contradictions, love and loss as much as by work. My hope is that audiences come away seeing not just my father, but the people we pass every day, with greater curiosity, empathy and compassion. I also wanted my film to remind us of our shared humanity and how the power of kindness can profoundly alter the course of someone’s life. At a time when immigrant lives are too often reduced to headlines and political rhetoric, public media creates space for nuance, connection and the kinds of stories that invite us to see one another not as symbols or statistics, but as parents, children, dreamers, and neighbors.”
"The Gas Station Attendant lives in the space between the stories families tell and the ones left unsaid,” said Chris White, Executive Producer of POV and American Documentary. "Drawing from decades of memories and a trove of home movies, Karla Murthy honors her father's journey without simplifying it, creating a film that is as much about family and memory as it is about immigration. In doing so, she asks us to rethink what success looks like, who gets to define it and the stories we tell ourselves about the American Dream. It's a powerful reminder that every life is far more complex than the narratives we often assign to it."
“The Gas Station Attendant” had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest (2025), where it received the Grand Jury Special Mention Award, and went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Jury Award at the Nashville Film Festival (2025) and the Best Documentary Feature Award at the San Diego Asian Film Festival (2025) and the Austin Asian American Film Festival (2026). The film was also an Official Selection of DOC NYC (2025).
“The Gas Station Attendant” is a co-production of Greene Fort Productions LLC and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), Firelight Media and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) in association with PBS, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Karla Murthy is the director, producer, writer, cinematographer and editor. Rajal Pitroda is also a producer. Andrew Fredericks, Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana and Andy Sarjahani are also cinematographers. Shana Swanson and Julia Pontecorvo are the supervising producers. Bobak Lotfipour is the composer. The executive producers are Carrie Lozano, ITVS; Geeta Gandbhir; Rekha Malhotra; Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Loira Limbal, Firelight Media; Stephen Gong, Donald Young, CAAM; and Erika Dilday and Chris White for American Documentary | POV.
Credits
Director/Producer/Writer/Cinematographer/Editor: Karla Murthy
Producer: Rajal Pitroda
Participants/Cast: H. N. Shantha Murthy, Karla Murthy, Murthy Family, Jad Abumrad, Kern Family
Executive Producers: Carrie Lozano, Geeta Gandbhir, Rekha Malhotra, Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Loira Limbal, Stephen Gong, Donald Young, Erika Dilday, Chris White
Cinematographers: Andrew Fredericks, Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana, Andy Sarjahani
Supervising Producers: Shana Swanson, Julia Pontecorvo
Composer: Bobak Lotfipour
Country: USA
Language: English
Year: 2025
“The Gas Station Attendant” will be available for streaming concurrently with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video App, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. PBS station members can view many series, documentaries and specials via PBS Passport. For more information about PBS Passport, visit the PBS Passport FAQ website. In addition to standard closed captioning for the film, POV, in partnership with audio description service DiCapta, provides real-time audio interpretations for audiences with sensory disabilities.
About the Filmmakers
Karla Murthy, Director, Producer, Writer, Cinematographer, Editor, The Gas Station Attendant
Karla Murthy is a director and Emmy®-nominated producer. She began her career working as a producer, shooter and correspondent for several news programs on PBS. Her award-winning work was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as “compelling, informative and compassionate.” Her directorial debut, the feature documentary The Place That Makes Us, screened at numerous film festivals and premiered on the acclaimed American Documentary series America ReFramed. Most recently, she directed and edited the short film Love, Jamie about a transgender artist incarcerated in Texas which premiered at Outfest LA (2023) where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Documentary Short and was called “one of the best short documentaries” by Texas Monthly. The film is now streaming on PBS’ American Masters. Karla is of Filipino and South Asian descent, grew up near Houston, Texas and graduated from Oberlin College. Her work has been supported by Women Make Movies, the New York State Council of the Arts, Vital Projects Fund, the Schumann Foundation, the Firelight Media Residency at Slough Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Chimaera, and Yaddo artist residency.
Rajal Pitroda, Producer, The Gas Station Attendant
Rajal Pitroda is a producer of fiction and non-fiction films that examine issues of race, class and gender beyond the mainstream narrative. She is a Film Independent Documentary Producing Lab Fellow (2024-2025), Women at Sundance Fellow (2021-2022), Impact Partners Producers Fellow (2021-2022), and Sundance Creative Producing Fellow (2020-2021). Rajal’s recent credits include the award-winning documentary short A Shot at History, which premiered at the Double Exposure Film Festival (2024), Southern Fried Lies on Peacock, and Down a Dark Stairwell, which premiered at the True/False Film Festival [ADD YEAR] and was broadcast on Independent Lens. She was a consulting producer on The Chaplain and the Doctor, which premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2025), and How To Have An American Baby, which was broadcast on POV. Rajal started her career in film working in international marketing for Bollywood movies based in Mumbai. She has a degree in Economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from London Business School.
Bobak Lotfipour, Composer, The Gas Station Attendant
Bobak Lotfipour is a second-generation Iranian/Mexican American from Denton, Texas and currently lives and works as a composer and performance artist in Los Angeles, California. In 2016, while still working as a musician playing drums with the band, Dark Rooms, Bobak began his composing career assisting Daniel Hart with The Exorcist TV series. Since then, he has contributed additional
music for a diverse range of productions, including David Lowry directed films A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, Hellraiser, Netflix Original Series The Society, and AMC+ Original Series Interview with the Vampire, before landing his first feature length documentary, King Coal, directed by Academy Award®-nominee and multi Emmy®Award winner, Elaine Sheldon.
About Us
About POV
Building on five 2026 News & Documentary Emmy® nominations, POV remains one of the most highly-acclaimed documentary series in broadcast and streaming. Recent honors include a 2026 Emmy® win for The Ride Ahead (POV Season 38), a 2024 Emmy® win for Eat Your Catfish (POV Season 37), a 2023 Emmy® win for The Last Out (POV Season 36), and a Peabody Award for While We Watched (POV Season 36), marking the eleventh consecutive year a POV film has been nominated for a Peabody and its 28th win. Additional recognition includes an IDA Documentary Award win for Best Curated Series in 2022 and nominations in that category for three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025) and the inclusion of seven POV films in Indiewire’s “The 50 Best Documentaries of the 21st Century”: Faya Dayi (2021), The Mole Agent (2020), Minding The Gap (2018), Cameraperson (2016), The Look of Silence (2015), The Act of Killing (2013) and After Tiller (2013). Across its history, POV films and projects have garnered more than 108 News & Documentary Emmy® nominations and won 53 Emmy Awards®, 29 Peabody Awards, 17 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three Academy Awards® and the first-ever George Polk Documentary Film.
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American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia organization dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. A catalyst for public culture, AmDoc develops collaborative strategic engagement initiatives around socially relevant content across television, digital platforms and in community settings, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and civic participation. AmDoc’s programming includes its multi–Emmy®, Oscar®, and Peabody Award–winning flagship series POV, the Oscar® and Emmy® winning POV Shorts, and America ReFramed. As part of its ongoing digital expansion, AmDoc is extending the reach of its work through expanded documentary programming on YouTube, connecting independent documentary storytelling with broader audiences and evolving how public media reaches viewers today. Follow @americandocumentary on social media.
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