Review: Hoping to do some good in Gaza, the subjects of 'American Doctor' keep frustration in check
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Set us as preferred Most documentaries urge you to not turn away from the horrors they chronicle, but few make that request as explicitly as “American Doctor.”Near the start of her despondent film, director Poh Si Teng spends time with Mark Perlmutter, a North Carolina surgeon who, like Teng’s other subjects, volunteers in Gaza, treating the many who have been severely injured in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Furious at the attacks on innocent Palestinian children, Perlmutter shows Teng photos of dead bodies.
She says she may need to blur them for the movie.Perlmutter becomes indignant: “You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” he says.
“You have the responsibility, as I do, to tell the truth.” Teng does reveal those stark faces and much more — not just the terrible human toll of Israel’s shelling of the Palestinian territories but also the strain on the doctors fighting to save lives while spreading the word about the atrocities they’ve witnessed.Perlmutter, who is Jewish, is one of three American physicians at the center of Teng’s documentary.The other two are Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian, and Feroze Sidhwa, who is Zoroastrian.
Each of them resides in the U.S.but is drawn to lending a hand at Gazan hospitals — that is, when they’re actually allowed entry into the region.
(Because of Ahmad’s Palestinian heritage, he’s been barred by the Israeli government.) As part of their humanitarian efforts, Perlmutter and his colleagues go on Western media, such as CNN, to decry the conditions of the Palestinian people.They are often met with resistance, if not outright hostility.
The casualties keep piling up, and nobody outside the walls of the hospital seems to care.World & Nation American doctors and nurses volunteering in the Gaza Strip have helped the world understand t...