Poh Si Teng's American Doctor, which premiered at Sundance in January, is 93 minutes of vérité filmmaking about three physicians who volunteer at a besieged hospital in Gaza. It is also a film about determination, of materialist courage---to heal, to do no harm---persisting under the relentlessness of genocide and occupation.
The titular American doctors are Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina whose father cared for Holocaust survivors in liberated concentration camps, smuggles medical supplies into Gaza in his personal luggage. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon of from California, Zoroastrian, of Parsi heritage, takes video calls from journalists between operations while bombs explode in the not-distant horizon.