Sundance ’26: ‘AMERICAN DOCTOR’ a Charged Account of Gaza’s Humanitarian Breakdown

American Doctor forces audiences to confront the carnage inflicted on Gaza’s civilians, particularly children, early and often. For anyone who somehow avoided footage of dead babies across social media in 2025, the film offers a corrective almost immediately. One doctor argues it would be “journalistic malpractice” not to show the corpses, claiming that omitting them in the name of dignity is actually a form of sane-washing what is going on, a sanitization that actually only strips the dead of their humanity. The only way to cede dignity, he argues, is to show the truth, no matter how horrifying.

Director Poh Si Teng bears witness to the 2025 Israel-Palestine Gaza War (read: genocide) through the eyes of three American doctors: one Palestinian (Thaer Ahmad), one Jewish (Mark Perlmutter), and one Zoroastrian (Feroze Sidhwa). They enter Gaza to save lives as hospitals are systematically razed, in clear violation of international war crime laws. The targeting of medical infrastructure isn’t just illegal. It guarantees prolonged, generational suffering. When hospitals disappear, so does any hope of care for injuries today, births tomorrow, or traumas that haven’t even happened yet.

The imagery is tragically familiar: dusty rubble, bombed-out hospitals, civilians clawing through debris. But American Doctor tries to give shape to that suffering, turning it into a narrative that’s both impossible to ignore and predictably unbearable to watch. The fact that the state-sanctioned murder of children became too politically charged to even discuss in good faith says everything about the moral and humanitarian collapse surrounding Gaza.

The film highlights the emotional range and perspective of each doctor. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is composed and factual, the kind of calm that only comes from seeing too much. Dr. Mark Perlmutter is visibly shaken and angry, especially at media outlets that try to soften or spin the horror. Dr. Thaer Ahmad grapples with the tension between his American and Palestinian identities. He confronts red tape, propaganda, and a growing sense of futility. At one point, Doctor Sidhwa cites a horrifying statistic: children in Gaza are being killed at a rate 600 times higher than those in Ukraine. It hits with blunt force.

It’s also telling that some audiences need white American doctors to confirm what should already be obvious. That’s not just a failure of journalism. That’s a failure of basic humanity. The doctors feel it too. There’s guilt, helplessness, and the creeping realization that there’s no version of this story where they come out having done enough.

The film also captures the surreal political dynamic where expressing concern for Palestinian children somehow gets equated with antisemitism. American Doctor doesn’t bother to entertain that argument. It is openly political, and it has no interest in softening the critique. American tax dollars covered roughly 70 percent of Israel’s war expenditures. “As an American, I just don’t want to see my country involved in crimes,” says Dr. Sidhwa, before footage pivoting to more dead bodies.

Eventually, these doctors leave the war zone and enter the bureaucratic one. Their campaign leads them to Capitol Hill, where they face the offices of senators like Thom Tillis and Ted Cruz in order to round up support. Obviously, this does not go over well. Over and over, what they encounter is the same thing: a system that has trained itself to look away from suffering and offers no consequence for its clear violation of legal and moral statutes.

CONCLUSION: ‘American Doctor’ is not easy to watch, and it shouldn’t be. The images are gruesome. The message is clear. The outrage is palpable. Anything less would be journalistic malpractice.