Fear, loathing and life savings fuelled the making of American Doctor, the debut feature documentary from Poh Si Teng, which premiered at Sundance and is now screening at CPH:DOX in the Human Rights competition.
The film follows a trio of US-based doctors who decamped to Gaza to try and save lives, filming from December 2024 to December 2025.
The doctors are from diverse US backgrounds: Mark Perlmutter is a Jewish-American, Feroze Sidhwa is the American-born son of Pakistani Parsis who migrated to the US, while Chicagoan Thaer Ahmad is of Palestinian heritage.
Malaysia-born, New York-based Teng pulled no punches about the motivation behind her desire to bring the story of the doctors’ journey to the screen. “A year into the genocide, I didn’t have any more words. I was very angry. And then came despair. I didn’t know what to do with those emotions,” said the journalist-turned-filmmaker, speaking at a CPH: Conference session hosted by veteran documentary programmer Thom Powers of TUFF and Pure Nonfiction.
In an effort to channel her emotions productively, Teng quit her job at as a acreative executive at ABC/Disney, emptied her bank account of $150,000 and started to seek out potential collaborators. She turned to the friends and contacts she had made throughout her career, having worked as a documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera English, IDA grants director and as a journalist for the New York Times before
She had also previously produced the Oscar-nominated short film St. Louis Superman, and executive produced the Emmy award-winning Patrice: The Movie.
“I went to all these friends, asked for favours, because a film like this would cost easily $1.5 million because of the magnitude of it,” Teng said. “We didn’t have that kind of money, so I asked everybody to half their rate, halved the budget and everyone I asked wanted to be part of it.”
She told her young daughter sitting quietly in the front row of the Copenhagen session: “This is all the money I saved for you, my child. Maybe one day you will understand why.”
“Come to Malaysia”
However, it was a real gut punch when Teng realised she might not be able to raise enough of the budget from the US, where the Gaza genocide was a contentious issue, to finish what she had started.
“I was just crushed,” she recalled. “But then a friend of mine from Malaysia said: ‘I don’t know how it is in the United States, but come back home. We’re not divided on the genocide.’”
Teng corralled just shy of $200,000 in cash donations from Malaysian family, friends and financiers, which gave her and team “the wind in our sails that we so badly needed”. She returned to the US with more determination than ever to finish her film.
It was shot under the constant threat of death for the cameramen and the medics they were following. The film’s cinematographers – Ibrahim Al Otla and Chris Renteria – who each have five children- were embedded in Gaza for the shoot, dodging bombs and Israeli bullets. They smuggled out hours of footage to Teng on a daily basis, often communicating via the Signal messaging app.
“They shoot people with cameras there,” she said of the Israeli army in Gaza. “It is such a big ask to say, ‘Can you film here with these doctors’,? We will never forget their sacrifice.”
She said the dedication of Al Otla and Renteria, coupled with the dedication and skills of editors Christopher White and Ema Ryan Yamazaki, allowed her to fulfil her promise to make her unflinching, verité-driven documentary.
“It’s remarkable you pulled it off in a year,” observed Powers. “I lost a lot of hair,” she smiled grimly.
American Doctor was produced as a US-Palestine-Malaysia-Denmark co-production, produced by Teng through her Tiny Boxer Films, with New York- based Danish producer Kirstine Barfod, and former Al Jazeera English colleague Reem Haddad.
It is coproduced by Mohammed Sawwaf, the Gaza-based award-winning Palestinian filmmaker, producer and journalist, and Kaspar Lykke Schultz of Denmark’s Elk Film. The executive producers include Hamza Ali of Chicago-based finance and distribution company Watermelon Pictures. Autlook FilmSales is handling international rights.
As a US citizen, Teng told Screen she is not fearful of any bite back her film may provoke from the current government.
“Europe is ready for this film, Asia is definitely ready,” she said. “Institutions and companies are made up of people and those people change. We have to show more people what is happening there.”
The filmmaker is now working on her second documentary feature. As with American Doctor, she is keeping the project under wraps until it is filming.
“It’s fully-funded at least,” she smiled, this time with relief.
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