American Doctor

It is a necessary watch because it dares its audience not to look away, forcing the question not only of whose story is told, but whose deaths matter and make headlines.

A vital documentary, Teng gives an intimate look at not only the toll the genocide has had on Gaza, but on the first responders who can do nothing but give their everything, even as the hospitals they work in become military targets of bombings, and survival is far from a certainty.

American Doctor is hard to watch and it should be. It’s hard to live in a world like this, where things like this happen. Where we let things like this continue to happen.

[Teng] certainly succeeds in creating an impassioned triple profile of the men who are, if anything, increasingly determined to make a difference for the civilians and medics of Gaza, while viscerally bringing home the extent of the brutal tragedy on the ground.

By its very existence — and in what it reveals about the IDF’s killing, maiming and wounding of Palestinian civilians over the past few years — the film is a condemnation both of Netanyahu’s far-right war machine and the U.S. government’s steadfast support of it.

American Doctor is a horrifying film to watch, but that’s the point.