To direct her first feature documentary, American Doctor director Poh Si Teng quit her job and emptied the entirety of her bank account.
It was 2024 and Teng, a former documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera English and a New York Times journalist, was fed up with the Israel-Hamas War.
“It was very difficult to see people that I respected in journalism and Al Jazeera being targeted and executed,” Teng said during a Q&A in Copenhagen Tuesday.
The director was in Denmark to screenAmerican Doctor at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). The film premiered at Sundance.
“A year into the genocide, I didn’t have any more words, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” Teng said while speaking with TIFF programmer Thom Powers at CPH:DOX’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg. “I was very angry. And then came despair. I didn’t know what to do with those emotions.”
Then Teng, the producer of the Oscar-nominated St. Louis Superman and Emmy Award–winning executive producer of Patrice: The Movie, saw Dr. Mark Perlmutter on TV. The Jewish American physician was speaking to a reporter about his recent trips to Gaza, where he volunteered his services at a local hospital.
Teng was impressed with not only Dr. Perlmutter’s work in Palestine but also his candid response to a question about Israeli politics and ceasefire pledges.
“He said, ‘There is no ceasefire,’” Teng recalled. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ So, I looked him up.”
Teng met Dr. Perlmutter in New York City. He introduced her to fellow physicians, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a non-practicing Zoroastrian American. Together all three doctors were risking everything to save lives in Gaza. Teng knew immediately that she had to make a documentary about the trio.
“For years, I believed the industry didn’t need another (doc) director,” Teng told Powers. But as a citizen of the United States, she felt compelled to make the film.
“I wanted to bring this reality home to American audiences.” Teng said. “This is not just Israel’s war on Gaza. It is America’s war, with billions of dollars of American weapons being used to kill children and the innocent.”
Poh Si Teng on Making American Doctor
Production on the 93-minute doc began in December 2024. Initially Dr. Perlmutter planned on getting Teng into Gaza as a scrub nurse, but the director knew that wouldn’t work.
“I was like, ‘Mark, the Israelis control the border. Anybody who does a cursory search in my name will know that I’m not a scrub nurse,’” Teng said.
So, the director hired two local Palestinian cinematographers, Arthur Nazaryan and Ramzy Haddad, and worked remotely with the doctors as they volunteered in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, south of the Strip.
“They shoot people with cameras there,” Teng said. “So, it is such a big ask to say, ‘Can you film here with these doctors?’”
Nazaryan and Haddad asked Teng: “Please bring the story back to the U.S.”
American Doctor begins with Dr. Perlmutter showing Teng photographs of Palestinian children who have been killed. Teng isn’t sure if she should include the brutal photos in a film. She is concerned about protecting the dignity of the children.
“You’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies, tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide,” Dr. Perlmutter tells Teng in the film. “You’re not doing them a service by not showing them. This is what my tax dollars did. That’s what your tax dollars did… You pixelate [the photos], that’s journalistic malpractice.”
American Doctor also shows the physicians forced to decide who they can try to save from among an overwhelming number of patients.
Throughout the film, the doctors’ harrowing work treating open wounds and severed limbs is intermixed with their efforts to communicate with the Western media about the unspeakable brutality happening in Gaza due to Israel’s air strikes. It’s a futile effort often met with indifference.
At an American Doctor Q&A at Sundance, Dr. Ahmad admitted that he was initially skeptical of Poh’s efforts. “I said, ‘I really hope it’s worth all of your time and effort and the entire team that put this together.’ I just felt like people would not be interested in hearing this.”
While American Doctor has not yet secured a U.S. distributor, Teng said that she hopes Americans eventually get a chance to see it.
“If they see it, they would not be okay with this,” Teng said. “No one would be okay with it.”
You can read more of our film festival coverage here.
Main image: American Doctor, courtest of CPH: DOX.