American Doctor is a kind of cinematic Hippocratic oath. Its subjects are three US physicians who, as genocide rages, volunteer to go above and beyond the call of duty to treat Gaza’s beleaguered residents. Having seen the carnage with their own eyes, the trio then set out to inform a callous Congress and a supplicant press about what is really happening inside the enclave’s hospitals — and to the medical workers who staff them.

The three could hardly be less alike. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-born emergency room physician, is a Palestinian American Muslim. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon based in North Carolina, is Jewish. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon near Stockton, California, is Zoroastrian, of Parsi background. All three worked at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. Shot by Gaza-based crews who filmed on the condition that the footage make it out of the enclave, the ninety-one-minute film follows the doctors into the operating theater and then home again, into a country that would rather not hear what they have to say.

American Doctor’s director, Poh Si Teng, was born into an ethnic Chinese family that practices Buddhism and raised in Malaysia. She came to the United States two decades ago to study journalism at San Francisco State University. She has worked as a camera operator, writer, and staff reporter for the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera English, among others. She produced Flirting With the Islamic State (2015), was Oscar-nominated for St. Louis Superman (2019), and won an Emmy for Patrice: The Movie (2024).