American Doctor

Journalist and documentarian Poh Si Teng (director of the Oscar-nominated Short Doc St. Louis Superman) trains her camera on three American doctors of different backgrounds and personality types for this doctor's-eye view of the war in Gaza, the way it is covered in the American press, and how it's viewed in the halls of Congress. The three subjects, who all know each other from working in this and other war zones, couldn't be more perfectly chosen. One, an outspoken Jewish-American whose Army doctor father attended to concentration camp survivors in WWII, is fiercely critical of how his and his fellow Americans' tax dollars are being used to fund this genocide. The second, a younger Californian of Pakistani descent, is, by necessity, far more measured, contemplative, and careful with his words. Yet he has less hope than anything these men do or say in the public spokesperson roles they backed into simply by being American Doctors on the ground in a warzone will make any difference in the outcome of this conflict. The third, a Palestinian-American doctor from Chicago, who has traveled with the other two in the past, is no longer allowed to enter Gaza for reasons the American Embassy won't specify, other than the fact that his parents are from Palestine.

The film follows these guys as they undertake delicate surgery on casualties of this war, many of them young children, in hospitals being intentionally targeted and bombed, and then shifts to the even more challenging work of trying to cut through all the propaganda and spin of Western and Israeli media to try to accurately represent the situation in Gaza as they have witnessed it firsthand. It's a maddening film that conveys the everyday heroism of these medical men and their deep frustration at not being able to do anything beyond saving individual lives here and there.