Column: Witness to Genocide -- ‘American Doctor’
Updated: 15 minutes ago
Director Poh Si Teng sits down with Sampan to discuss documentary following doctors witnessing horrors in Gaza.
It’s hard not to become overwhelmed by a sense of dread and guilt within the first few minutes of watching the new documentary film “American Doctor.”
After seeing flashes of imagery of frantic medics taking bloodied Palestinian children out of an ambulance in Gaza, viewers see Dr. Mark Perlmutter at his home in North Carolina. He’s looking at a computer screen, talking with Poh Si Teng, director of “American Doctor.” The two are looking at a photo that we, the viewer, can’t yet see, and then Teng says, “I feel like I’m going to end up blurring it or not using it.”
“Why?” asks Dr. Perlmutter, appearing indignant. “That’s the problem,” he says, to not use the photo in the documentary would amount to journalistic malpractice.
Scenes from 'American Doctor'; courtesy images.
Then the camera turns to the screen on Perlmutter’s table. We see the photo of several small children lying side by side like dolls. Their skin is grey in color, their clothing dusty and blotched with dried blood. They are all dead.
“It’s always one of those things in broadcast news: How much do you show? How much do you not show?” Teng said in a Sept. 17 interview with Sampan inside the Coolidge Corner Theatre, while her documentary was screening nearby. “Even in documentary filmmaking, if you show too much, it’s gratuitous and people cannot take it. If I play it here at the Coolidge and I show too much, people are going to run out of the theater. But if you don’t show it, then it’s not real. And it’s a huge disrespect to the survivors – it’s a disservice.”
In the film, when Teng is weighing how to handle the image, she says she worries about the dignity of the dead children. Upset with her hesitation, Perlmutter counters that what caused them to lose their dignity was Israel and, through policy and tax dollars, the United States.
Suddenly we are confronted with another image that’s both familiar and suffocating: the vast, apocalyptic landscape of endless destruction, building after building, as far as the eye can see, destroyed and surrounded by piles of rubble. A weak, orange sun hovers just above the horizon.
We’re not sure if the sun is about to rise or set. It doesn’t matter. All we feel is foreboding darkness.
We feel guilty, because we are reminded in these few images how by just going about our daily lives as U.S. citizens, we unwittingly become part of the genocidal assault on Gaza, through our nation’s policies, funding and weapons sales. We feel dread because we know the death and destruction is far more vast than we can comprehend, than we have wanted to believe. We know that more bodies have yet to be uncovered. We also feel dread because we all fear for the future of Palestine.
“The U.S. just agreed to $2.8 billion in weapons to Israel – $2.8 billion,” said Teng during our interview. She repeats this several times, in fact, over the course of our conversation.
As we watch the Watermelon Pictures film, we wish we could turn back time. We wish the students crying out in late 2023 and all throughout 2024 were listened to and not doxed, canceled, arrested and … detained. We wish that we had done more. We cannot watch the film without feeling that, in our own way, we all somehow failed.
Well, Teng, in her film that’s also coproduced by Kirstine Barfod and Reem Haddad, follows a small team of doctors who did as much as they could. And still these doctors often ask if they were doing enough, and if what they did would even matter in the long run, to the future of Palestine.
Perlmutter is joined by two other doctors, Dr. Thaer Ahmad and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa. We see them in the operating room at the Nassar Medical Complex in Gaza, and behind the scenes as they give interviews to news outlets on networks like CNN. But Teng also takes us to their kitchens and living rooms back home in the U.S. We see Dr. Ahmad, for example, with his wife and young children and Perlmutter confiding in his partner before he sets off for Gaza. We see Sidhwa talk about his Pakistani background and how he can advocate so relentlessly for Palestinians because he has no family obligations. But it’s clear all three men would do what they were doing no matter what. We see them walking the halls of Congress to speak with U.S. lawmakers and the disappointment that follows. We see them at cafes with other doctors, strategizing how to advocate for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, begging for a ceasefire.
Telling the story of the genocide through these three doctors, said Teng, not only spotlights their devotion and work, but allows Americans to peer into the lives of Palestinian doctors and other healthcare workers in Gaza.
“The three American doctors are a lens to the way in – they take us into the portal to Gaza, to the Nassar Medical Complex, and then we meet all these wonderful Palestinian doctors, who were already there,” she told Sampan. “I wanted people to see doctors there, nurses there, medical students there, to see that they are no different from all the medical workers here in the U.S. That’s what I thought was missing from all of the news of the carnage.”
Growing up in Malaysia and moving to the U.S. at 19, Teng said she is aware of bias and prejudice in the media when it comes to whose voices are considered worthy.
“I’m very perceptive as to whose voice gets heard, to who is the credible source.… So, all of that is always in the back of my mind and it is precisely the reason why the film is the way it is. It’s almost like a Trojan horse…. As a filmmaker, I wanted an American audience to see this.”
And it has. After screening at the Sundance Film Festival and other major film festivals, her film has been playing in theaters across the country. One of the most rewarding, and surprising, places it was screened at was True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. She said the film was hugely popular there – right in America’s heartland.
“That audience was the most electric one I’ve seen yet,” she said, adding that “everyone was in tears."
When she asked people why they watched at True/False, she said they were drawn by the title.
That title, she said, was actually something she knew she would call the movie from early on but also wanted to keep to herself.
“I didn’t even tell my own team,” she said. “For the longest time the film was called ‘Untitled Doctor.’ Close to the end, they were like, ‘Well, we need a title;’ I was like, we already have one. ‘American Doctor.’ I remember telling Dr. Thaer Ahmad and he was like, ‘Huh, interesting.' I was like, 'Well it’s accurate. You’re all doctors, and you’re all American.’”
“I’m very aware of what people watch, how they watch, how perceptive they are, how titles influence them one way or another. So, having a title that was accurate was important. But, also, this is the way you Trojan horse people in to Palestine. I did not want people to brush it off because the title was ‘Gaza’ something or ‘Palestine’ something. I have worked in media long enough to know how things are perceived.”
Poh Si Teng already had decades of journalism and filmmaking experience under her belt before setting out to create “American Doctor.” In addition to working at the New York Times and Al Jazeera, she is credited with directing or producing works such as “Patrice: The Movie,” and the short "St. Louis Superman.”
“For a long time, I just didn’t think my voice was needed,” said Teng, when asked why she began the project, and invested a large portion of her personal savings into the film. Then she kept seeing journalists getting targeted by Israel, one after another killed.
“One person in particular, I didn’t know him personally, but his name was Samer Abu Daqqa, a cameraman for Al Jazeera. … Seeing him bleed to death, because the paramedics weren’t able to get to him because of the Israeli military – that broke me. And then, being in the United States, and all of my journalist peers were all so silent.”
By the end of the film, we still feel dread and pangs of guilt. But we know things have changed. We see more and more people who no longer fear speaking out. We see the tide is turning. People are appalled by the carnage in Gaza, the injustice in the West Bank, the silencing of dissent. We also know this shift in the way people view the genocide could not have happened without the tireless work of people like these American doctors.
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