In an important, grim narrative, Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor” chronicles the efforts of three American doctors to treat the wounded in Gaza and, therefore, in impossibly difficult circumstances. From Chicago, Palestinian Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an ER specialist. Jewish Dr. Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, and Zoroastrian Dr. Feroze Sidwa, son of Pakistani immigrants of Parsi heritage, is a trauma surgeon in California. All three describe their tenacious commitments and sustained efforts, their experiences illustrated by graphic video footage of the onerous conditions at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis throughout the year before and during the unstable 2025 January to March ceasefire. One of the few Gaza hospitals still operating to some degree, the facility regularly sustains targeted bombing attacks.
Documentarian director Teng begins the film as a critical decision must be made. As she listens and records, a debate ensues about the ethical dilemma of showing a graphic photo of dead Palestinian children lying side by side. Dr. Perlmutter argues that censoring the image would be medical malpractice, that the photo acknowledges the victims’ dignity, not the reverse. He prevails. Subsequent scenes add equally disturbing evidence. For example, in one of Dr. Sidwa’s surgeries a child’s arm had to be amputated without anesthesia. At the 2026 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri (where I first saw the documentary followed by a Q&A), Dr. Perlmutter said that as an American paying taxes he felt deeply complicit in what he explicitly labels genocide. Statistically, since October 2023, over 1700 health care workers and over 18,000 children have been killed in Gaza with 94 percent of Gaza’s hospitals damaged or destroyed, according to the WHO. Moreover, in addition to death threats against the doctors for their volunteer medical assistance, because of his Palestinian heritage, Dr. Ahmad has difficulty even gaining admittance to Gaza, confronting and arguing with official sentries despite producing required American credentials.
Through media podcasts, family interviews, meetings with D.C. lawmakers, first-hand footage of operating rooms and wartime bombing, navigating crowded hospital corridors and desperately searching for all-too-scarce medical supplies, all three doctors exhibit an extraordinary courage and commitment to help those in need, to “do no harm.”
In first-person interviews in the U.S. and in Gaza locations, they bear witness to appalling challenges, caught, as they note, between medicine and politics. As noted at True/False, so too was first-time feature film director Poh Si Teng, for it took eight countries to make this film and all her life savings since her requests for support were repeatedly turned down as “institutional risk.”
Equally fearless, the documentary’s two Gaza-based cinematographers, Ibrahim Al Otla and Christopher Renteria, talked with Gaza residents and sent video on a daily basis from Nasser Hospital’s balcony, later destroyed in an Israeli strike killing twenty-two individuals, medical staff and journalists alike. Crew members endured first-hand the lack of food in the southern Gaza Strip amidst blockades. “American Doctor” refuses to look away from the ordeals of medical staff and Gaza residents, with no end in sight. The premiere St. Louis screening of “American Doctor” is at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium one night only, Thursday, August 27, at 7:30 p.m. For more information: Webster.edu/filmseries.