How many years of social media videos, news stories, special reports, boycotts, testimonies, and feature films will it take for the war crimestaking place in Gaza to end? When even negotiated ceasefires can’t cease the fire, what hope is there that the experiences of those on the ground will have some impact? This is the impossible problem faced by three medical doctors of different backgrounds and of shared intent in Poh Si Teng’s heartbreaking documentary American Doctor. Striving to nip any dismissive counterarguments or disingenuous cries of conspiracy in the bud, the unflinching film not only includes horribly graphic footage taken at a Gaza hospital, but makes sure that the on-the-ground subjects speaking to the horrors are unimpeachably diverse: Jewish, Muslim, and Zoroastrian. It is a film intrinsically shaped by the fallacies trotted out by its enemies, the deniers of an atrocity, and a film explicitly concerned that if this isn’t enough, nothing will be.
The three subjects of American Doctor aren’t activists, or at least, they didn’t start out that way. The volunteers, who ship out to serve stints at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, simply want to save the lives of the injured and ill who need them. They didn’t expect to care for so many dying children, or to be bombed by the Israel Defense Forces, the same IDF who let them into the country in the first place, while doing so.
Their service under fire—and the experience of watching swaths of the world population (not to mention the media) regard that service and the violence driving it as fake, staged, or overblown—has given these men two options: Go crazy under the weight of their surreal circumstances, or commit themselves to proving these naysayers wrong. And Mark Perlmutter (a Jewish American from North Carolina), Thaer Ahmad (a Palestinian American from Chicago), and Feroze Sidhwa (a Parsi American from California) would very much like to retain whatever sanity they’ve managed to cling to.
Though the point of American Doctor is that these men of different religious and ethnic backgrounds have all experienced the same harrowing truth, to undermine anyone trying to couch their disavowal along identity lines—already a terribly sad necessity for the documentary—these doctors aren’t interchangeable. Apart from their different medical specialties and histories, their personalities color how they react to the trauma and indignity of witnessing a genocide firsthand and being told that they’re lying about it.
Sidhwa goes on the offensive with the most vigor, writing editorials and answering questions as a cable news talking head. He’s professional and diplomatic, yet steely. He also often appears with Perlmutter, who is the heat to Sidhwa’s coolness. Understanding that the Pakistani and Palestinian doctors he works with risk racism with every word, Perlmutter weaponizes his Jewishness to bluntly and passionately criticize Israel without worrying as much about being reflexively labeled an antisemite. Meanwhile, Ahmad must play it safest of all; his very identity has already led the Israeli government to bar him from volunteering as a medical professional. He appears at Palestinian-led conferences, but is mostly stuck in a hotel room in limbo. He’s nowhere near as prolific as his peers, a symbolic representation of how effectively Palestinians everywhere are silenced.
These perspectives are just as important to American Doctor as its footage from Nasser Hospital. Shocking, unobscured images of murdered children and re-wounded victims (re-wounded because the IDF keeps shooting missiles at hospitals) are intentionally confrontational, as frustrated with half-measures and decorum as the doctors who—upon their return to the U.S.—find themselves crashing head-on with a political brick wall. In fact, Perlmutter demands that Teng eschew cinematic convention and show the unvarnished reality of the babies killed in an IDF missile strike. Anything else, any pixelated modesty, would deny reality.
And yet, no amount of moral clarity or well-spoken, furious, pointed testimony can seem to pierce the self-imposed ignorance of those in power. It will always be easier for the public to find excuses not to listen to things that are hard to hear. For those with financial and political interests wrapped up in the extermination of an entire people, it’s even easier. These are the conditions under which this film was made, its content and form reflecting this reality.
Seeing its subjects receive death threats for daring to talk about the murders they’ve tried to prevent with their own hands, I understood the cynicism behind American Doctor. I got why it made its unblurred gore undeniable, why it dared me to literally look away from dead children. I was struck by this bluntly, in the same way that those in the courtroom were pummeled by the hour-long military documentary entitled Nazi Concentration Camps when it was shown during the Nuremberg trials. Poh Si Teng’s film and the ongoing pleas of its subjects aren’t just essential, they are eleventh-hour pieces of evidence attempting to outmaneuver every possible bad-faith response that they’ve already weathered, straining to reach those who might still hold onto doubt or denial. After watching the movie, I share its worry that the need for advocacy might not last much longer. Soon, there will just be a need for obituaries.
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