American Doctor looks at the power and responsibility of refusing to look the other way.Supplied
American Doctor
Directed by Poh Si Teng
Classification N/A; 93 minutes
Opens in select theatres including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Aug. 14
Critic’s Pick
The new documentary American Doctor opens with an urgent debate.
On one side is Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina who has returned home after visiting Gaza to provide medical expertise and care to hospitals caught in the middle of a brutal Middle East reality. On the other side is Poh Si Teng, a Malaysian-American documentarian who is tracing the journeys of Perlmutter and two other American physicians who desperately want to bring worldwide attention to the devastation in the region.
The issue being argued at this particular, heated moment: Perlmutter wants Teng to display in the final cut of her film a photograph depicting Palestinian children murdered in a strike by the Israel Defense Forces – an image that the director instead wants to pixelate and obscure, to respect the dignity of the dead. Perlmutter won’t hear it – audiences around the world, he insists, deserve to see what is happening in Gaza. And by censoring such an image, he continues, Teng risks committing journalistic malpractice. So the filmmaker relents, and we are indeed presented with an image of dead toddlers – approximately three seconds of footage, which feels like a lifetime.
The moment is not quite indicative of Teng’s film as a whole – American Doctor is not an unrelenting barrage of on-screen horror. But the impact and intention of pausing on such a photo cannot be forgotten as the documentary examines the power and responsibility of refusing to look the other way.
Aside from that opening scene, Teng herself takes a backseat in the film, preferring the spotlight be on the Jewish-American Perlmutter and two other physicians: Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American ER doctor who lives in Chicago and is a devout Muslim, and Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California whose parents were Zoroastrians from Pakistan but who today bears no religious affiliation himself.
It may be crass to note each subject’s faith and racial background upfront, but highlighting their histories is a deliberate, ultimately integral tactic for Teng. Here are three men with radically different upbringings and professional journeys but who are steadfastly united on two fronts: infuriation over the actions of the IDF in Gaza, and deep disgust that each of them, as American taxpayers, are inadvertently funding such violence via the White House’s support for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Teng’s film recognizes that everyone will come in with a side, such as it is, already chosen. The challenge the doc tasks itself with meeting, then, is whether it can compel audiences of any political background to listen to and genuinely consider all of the doctors’ testimonies without prematurely writing them off. On this point, I can imagine few viewers making it through the other side of the film unmoved.
Occasionally, Teng’s reach is beyond her grasp. By unevenly oscillating between vaguely defined timelines – one strand following Perlmutter and Sidhwa on the ground inside Gaza’s Nasser Medical Complex, another looking at Ahmad’s frustration over being stuck at the Jordanian border, a third focused on Perlmutter and Sidhwa’s respective home lives, plus a few more loose narrative threads – Teng’s sense of storytelling gets increasingly foggy, needlessly engendering a lack of audience trust.
Each doctor is also large enough in personality and passion to carry their own story, yet Teng seems stubbornly tethered to Perlmutter above anyone else. The instinct is understandable – the man is a wide open book of emotions, and gives the best, most incendiary soundbites. More crucially, there is a softly spoken truth smuggled into the film’s reliance on Perlmutter that, by virtue of him being a white, Jewish voice, his words carry more weight in certain corners of the American medical and political establishment. Would, Teng asks without exactly phrasing it this way, her film be taken as seriously if she only collected the voices of brown-skinned doctors?
There will surely be storms of controversy over the film’s release, tiny as it may be. (The film, which premiered at Sundance in January before going on to win the Audience Award at Hot Docs, is being distributed by the fledgling Watermelon Pictures, which was established to highlight Palestinian and Arab cinema.) But any conversations that American Doctor starts must also acknowledge the unflinching reality chronicled within it.
Ultimately, Teng’s work lands as an essential snapshot – not an overarching chronicle of this horrible moment in history. It is a view from the ground, told by those who stepped foot inside calamity and rolled up their sleeves.
Perhaps the film’s ambitions and message are best summarized by the soft-spoken words of Sidhwa: “You don’t bomb a hospital, no matter what.” How many doctors, American or otherwise, could disagree?