Critic Reviews

While changing minds and congressional votes is a reasonable goal, for director Teng — a Malaysia-born, New York-based journalist and filmmaker, who resigned from her job at ABC/Disney — the motive was initially a response to her sense of helplessness.

The result is a documentary that implicitly honors these incredible doctors, but more acutely leverages their plight to address the numbing exasperation that such an atrocity is designed to instill among otherwise good people. It’s a documentary premised on the idea that nobody can stop the madness on their own, and how that’s all the more reason for everybody to resist it on their own terms.

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.

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.

The hospital scenes are the film’s heart, and they have an immediacy that the interspersed footage of the doctors at home in the United States cannot match.

For much of the film, the cries of Gazan children, or the impassioned pleas of our doctors, sing its message clearly enough.

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.

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.

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.