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‘The Patel Motel Story’ to premiere at Tribeca Festival in New York
The short-film traces how three undocumented immigrants from Gujarat launched a motel empire in the United States.
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Pranavi Sharma - Sun, 01, Jun 2025
- 23:47 EDT
- 633
Poster of the film. / The Patel Motel Story
The Patel Motel Story, a short film chronicling how Indian immigrants from Gujarat built a vast hotel empire in the United States, will premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival in New York City which starts on Jun.4.
The 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival, which runs from Jun. 4 to Jun. 15 across venues in New York City, will open at the Beacon Theatre. Founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff, the festival celebrates storytelling across film, television, music, and other forms.
Directed by Amar Shah and Rahul Rohatgi, ‘The Patel Motel Story’ is part of the festival’s Shorts: Common Ground program, which includes five other films. The documentary draws from Mahendra Doshi’s book ‘Surat to San Francisco’, chronicling how a group of undocumented Indian immigrants from Gujarat laid the foundation for a motel empire in the United States.
The story begins in 1942, when three Indian farmworkers—Kanji Manchhu Desai, Nanalal Patel, and D. Lal—came across a hotel in Sacramento, California. The Japanese American owner had been forced to abandon the property as she was sent to an internment camp during World War II. The trio, who had fled British-ruled India and were working illegally in the San Joaquin Valley, took over the business. That hotel would become the starting point for generations of Gujarati immigrants entering the U.S. hospitality sector.
In a Facebook post, Mahendra Doshi wrote, “I am very excited that the Patel Hoteliers Story will be told on the big screen. The directors and producers have used my book, Surat To San Francisco, as a base to narrate their feature.”
The film’s cast includes Doshi himself, along with Jyoti Sarolia, Rupesh Patel, and Mehul Patel. It is produced by Shah, Rohatgi, Milan Chakraborty, and Sanjay M. Sharma. Nathan Weyland is the cinematographer, Alex Wolfe is the editor, and music is composed by John Piscitello and Aalok Mehta. Illustrations are by Rhea Sajit.
According to Shah and Rohatgi, the film “will, for the first time ever, explore how the success of Indian-American hoteliers started in the first place,” drawing on interviews, memoirs, and archival materials. The filmmakers highlight the scope of the Patel presence in U.S. hospitality through events like AAHOACON, the annual convention of the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association. “Each attendee owns or manages a hotel or motel, or hundreds of them,” they wrote on the film’s official page. “And if you walk through the convention center… you’ll see the same name over and over and over again: Patel.”
The film aims to challenge stereotypes and “model minority” tropes by showing the struggles Patel immigrants faced—poverty, discrimination, and isolation—and how they overcame them to dominate a major American industry.
“We turned an investment in one motel into a multi-billion-dollar industry, and no one even noticed,” the directors stated. “It’s time to turn the camera toward our American stories.”
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