Filmmakers recount personal histories at Austin Asian American Film Festival
Written by Jessie Wang | July 15, 2026
The Austin Asian American Film Festival hosted their annual film festival, from June 24-28, to showcase stories from the Asian and Asian American diaspora. In both “Traces of Home” by Colette Ghunim and “The Gas Station Attendant” by Karla Murthy, the filmmakers document their families' testimony of immigration, and perhaps inevitably, explore their relationship with their parents and themselves.
Photo by Lorenzo De La Cruz
“Traces of Home” by Colette Ghunim
“Traces of Home,” the feature film at the Austin Asian American Film Festival, is filmmaker Colette Ghunim’s debut documentary. The film follows her parents revisiting the childhood homes they were forced to leave in Palestine and Mexico.
Colette’s father, Hosini Ghunim, was born in Safed, Palestine to an upper middle class family. When he was four years old, the family was expelled from their hometown during the “Nakba,” (the Arabic word for “catastrophe”), when over half a million Palestinians were displaced and dispossessed during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Hosini immigrated to the United States as a young man, where he met Iza Ghunim, Colette’s mother. At eight years old, Iza migrated to the United States from Mexico City with her siblings and mother to escape domestic violence. Growing up in suburban Chicago with her older brother, Ramsey Ghunim, Colette notes how her parents wanted their children to have a stable American life. But in her parent’s avoidance to confront the trauma of the past and create normalcy, their family relationships suffered.
Hosini, a wedding and events videographer, often filmed his children, and the documentary is interspersed with home videos of Colette and Ramsey’s childhood. Though there is humor in the family dynamics, there is also tension — often outwardly between Colette and Iza.
The theme of walls is represented through the emotional walls within the family unit, but also beyond that, in the physical world: when the Ghunims visit Palestine, there are structures like barbed wired fences dividing Palestine from Israel. And in Tijuana, Mexico, where Iza and her siblings briefly lived before being allowed to enter the United States, there is a militarized border wall separating Tijuana from San Diego, California.
But the confrontation of the past, however painful, also allows the family to tear down their own walls.
“Going on these journeys to Mexico and Palestine made me realize that I was trying to find home externally. It became a very deep healing journey around generational trauma and figuring out that the only way I would be able to ever find home is from within,” Colette said in an interview at the AAAFF.
“The Gas Station Attendant” by Karla Murthy
Photo by Lorenzo De La Cruz
Karla Murthy’s “The Gas Station Attendant” won a feature documentary at the AAAF and tells the story of her father, H.N. Shantha Murthy.
H.N. was born in Bangalore and ran away from home to escape poverty, living on the streets of India as a youth. While working at a hotel in Delhi, he befriended an American couple who sponsored his education and visa to come to the United States.
He met Murthy’s mother, a young woman from the Philippines, in college and was first employed in the space industry, but eventually settled in Texas as a serial entrepreneur — starting businesses, gift shops, and restaurants, despite none really taking off.
The film follows H.N. as he takes a role at a gas station to help pay the bills and attends trade shows to sell jewelry.
Murthy uses audio from calls between her and her father, while he worked at the gas station, to show the invisibility of immigrant labor within the liminal space a gas station occupies — at the corner of intersections, on the side of the highway, and tucked behind strip malls.
Throughout the film, Murthy documents her father’s ability to make friends with service workers, waitresses, and fellow trade show vendors. H.N.’s friendliness is both a reflection of his resilience and a survival tactic that allowed him to navigate the world as an immigrant.
The film serves not only as a documentation of her father’s story, but also Murthy’s realization of her father as a person with his own dreams, ambitions and experiences.
“Stories are a way of preserving family history, but more importantly they create a sense of continuity and resilience,” Murthy narrates in “The Gas Station Attendant.” “They build a framework to understand painful experiences and celebrate joyful ones. And so I'm telling these stories.”
More information on the Austin Asian American Film Festival can be found on their website: https://www.aaafilmfest.org/
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