At the start of “American Doctor,” one of the three main subjects, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, argues with the director, Poh Si Teng. He is explaining the experience of providing medical care in Gaza; she is reluctant to include a photograph of dead children. “I feel like I’m going to end up blurring it or not using it,” she tells him. He replies, “Why? That’s the problem.”
This documentary does what it can to show you what the doctors have seen. Although it jumps around in time, it is centered on a planned trip to Gaza by three American physicians during the tenuous cease-fire agreement that existed in early 2025. All three were also there the year before.
One, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician from Chicago, is unable to enter on this trip and winds up stuck in Jordan. (The film does not fully delve into the logistics; Ahmad tells us about learning that he is not on an approved list the night before he is set to enter Gaza.) The other two, Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, are shown working at a hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. To prepare, Perlmutter packed scrubs and antibiotics to ensure that he would have them.
We watch the doctors during their operations, meetings with patients and quietly moving interactions with the regular medical staff. After the cease-fire ends, Sidhwa, who documented his experiences and polled doctors for an Opinion piece in The New York Times in 2024, describes narrowly escaping a bombing because he happened to have been pulled into the intensive care unit at that moment. In that same segment, Sidhwa, seemingly speaking of the person he had originally intended to check on, says: “That’s the first time I’ve ever done an operation on a patient who was blown up, and then had him get blown up again in his hospital bed.”
The hospital scenes are the film’s heart, and they have an immediacy that the interspersed footage of the doctors at home in the United States cannot match. (Some of them speak of the guilt of not remaining in the conflict zone.) Teng, a documentary producer who has also done video journalism for The Times, shows her subjects appearing on podcasts and visiting U.S. lawmakers’ offices to press for medical aid in Gaza. Their identities are complex: Perlmutter is Jewish, Ahmad is Muslim and Sidhwa, though not religious, has Zoroastrian parents. Perlmutter, in some respects the most vociferous, says speaking out about health conditions in Gaza has both lost and gained him friends. Ahmad, who is Palestinian American, says that he is “not pro-anything.” He adds, “I’m a human being, I’m a doctor and I want to be able to practice and treat anybody.” That is one major message of this powerful film.
American Doctor Not rated. In English and subtitled Arabic and Hebrew. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.
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