The documentary American Doctor is an intimate and unflinching look at the decimated healthcare system in Gaza under Israeli assault.
The film follows three American surgeons on medical missions to the Palestinian territory and documents them treating wounded men, women and children. It also shares the trials of their Palestinian colleagues trying to live through bombardments, displacement and lack of food and medicine while working on casualties streaming into hospitals that often come under attack.
It's not all based in Gaza. The film follows the three Americans at home as well, and their efforts to share what they've seen, especially given that Israel has barred international journalists from entering Gaza and reporting independently for the entirety of this war.
The film begins with director Poh Si Teng speaking with orthopedic surgeon Mark Perlmutter in his North Carolina home. He shows her a photo of six Palestinian babies and children, lined up in a row. They've all been killed.
Teng tells him she plans to pixelate the image or not use it at all to respect their dignity. Perlmutter gets upset. He tells her that it would be journalistic malpractice and that she must show the image. So she does, which sets the tone for the film "at the very top."
"There's always such a delicate balance," Teng said in an interview with Morning Edition's Leila Fadel. "You show too much and it's gratuitous. You show too little, and it's not real, and it's a disservice and a huge disrespect for those who have passed on and the surviving family members."
Teng was joined for the interview by Perlmutter, as well as Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American emergency medicine physician also featured in the film. Ahmad described the challenges of providing care at a Gaza hospital full of people wounded by military weaponry.
"Every single day, you are dealing with what we call mass casualty events, meaning that there are dozens of people coming in at one single time. And you don't have the resources to treat them — you don't have the space," Ahmad said. "This is happening alongside a complete blockade and siege of food, medicine, water."
Perlmutter said that he knew going in that most of his patients would be children or babies, given that half of Gaza's population is under 18.
"I've amputated hundreds of legs in my overseas mission work over 30-plus years," Perlmutter said. "I've never had to amputate them without anesthesia before. The only thing they could do was sing to the baby."
Perlmutter said that the scarcity of medical supplies in Gaza is "deliberate" on the part of the Israeli government. When he entered Gaza, he says, surgical instruments and antibiotics that he brought with him, even the ones for personal use, were confiscated.
The Israeli government screens these supplies under "dual-use" policies and does not allow in whatever it decides could be used by militant groups or for military operations. Human rights organizations and medical volunteers have said that among the items being confiscated are incubators, ventilators and antibiotics.
The scenes inside Gaza were shot by Palestinian cinematographers. Teng filmed the doctors outside Gaza and back in the United States.
She said it was important to document Perlmutter, Ahmad and California-based trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa as they shared what they saw with the press, the public and members of Congress. "At the end of the day, if the U.S. wanted this to stop, it could," Teng said, referring to the billions of dollars in military support the U.S. provides to Israel.
"So, it was so important, then, to live in the world of these doctors, have them come home and see the pummeling that they would continue to get from members of Congress but also from the media."
American Doctor is in theaters in select U.S. cities.
