A key theme in American Doctor first arises in the opening minutes of the new documentary from director Poh Si Teng. Speaking with Mark Kerlmutter, a Jewish-American doctor, Teng wonders if the faces of dead Palestinian children should be blurred out for the film. Her logic is out of respect — and standard journalistic reflexes. But Kerlmutter disagrees. The families, he says, have given consent. “You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” he states.
The film then cuts to the image being discussed. A laptop screen fills the frame: six dead children, bodies grey in a scene of colour. The case being made is simple: don’t soften anything. These particular bodies are the story, and the stories of a genocide should never be muted.
American Doctor, which made its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs Festival on April 28, sticks to this difficult approach. The documentary follows three American doctors — Kerlmutter, Thaer Ahmad, and Feroze Sidhwa — who, after serving the year before, return to Gaza in March 2025 amid Israel’s ongoing genocide. Each doctor is trying, in different ways, to assist the sick and dying as the horrors stretch on.
Their ability to do their jobs is presented as uneven, often determined less by their credentials than by how they’re perceived; shaped as much by who they’re assumed to be through nationality as by what they’re trying to do.
Where American Doctor hits hardest is in how it shows that unevenness as mere routine. In one sequence, Ahmad eyes a WhatsApp message: his name denied entry, others granted. As a man of Palestinian descent, Israel repeatedly denies his entry into Gaza; the same paperwork as his colleagues, but a different outcome.
At other times, Kerlmutter and Sidhwa move through overwhelmed wards, filled with crying children, at the Nasser Medical Complex and European Hospital in Khan Younis, as well as Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. They treat victims with severe burns or with missing limbs, before stepping in front of Western news cameras, trying to translate what they’ve seen into something the outside world can digest. When they appear on CNN, their accounts are treated with skepticism and countered by Israeli talking points before the interviews are cut short.
The fact that so many government bodies and the mainstream press are shown to excuse such overwhelming horrors reads as intentional, as the film repeatedly returns to these framings — where Israeli actions are met with the deference afforded to an ally, less questioned than managed. Teng seems less interested in building an argument for why this is than in documenting a state of being that speaks for itself.
American Doctor, in many ways, makes the case that Palestinians are fully human, their lives worth as much as any, even if that’s an argument that shouldn’t have to be made. Palestinian voices do surface, if only in flashes — conversations, small moments that hang long enough to make you curious about their lives just outside the frame. In one scene, a Palestinian doctor recounts working through the wards before learning that his young daughter was killed, a story that leaves Kerlmutter in tears.
As such, it is clear this is not a Palestinian film, but rather a film about how the world sees and experiences Palestine. Rather than providing a broader accounting of how and why the genocide is happening, American Doctor deliberately narrows its focus on what it feels like to work under siege, where the unrelenting pressure never stops long enough to ask bigger questions or to fully empathize.
It’s also a documentary that does not — and cannot — end with the image of a job well done. According to Gaza health authorities, Israel has killed 72,593 people and wounded another 172,399 in the territory since October 2023.
American Doctor makes room for humour and joy within passing moments, but the film thoughtfully returns to its own sense of incompletion, because the reality it captures has yet to stop.
The film had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs on April 28 and also plays on April 29.
