A sense of outrage compelled Oscar-nominated producer Poh Si Teng to make her directorial debut, the searing American Doctor, now screening at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen.
“I was very angry and then came despair,” she explained in a talk at the CPH:Conference on Tuesday. “I didn’t know what to do with those emotions.”
Her emotions sprang from the catastrophic loss of life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment, invasion and blockade after the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians – men, women, and children – have been killed since October 2023. By one count cited by the UN, more than 250 journalists have been killed in Gaza in that period, some of them known to Teng from her time serving as a documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera English.
“A year into the genocide, it was very difficult to see people that I respected in the craft of journalism and Al Jazeera being targeted and executed,” she told moderator Thom Powers, podcaster, author, and documentary programmer at TIFF. Teng expressed dismay over what might be termed a collective shrug regarding the huge death toll of reporters, photographers and others trying to cover Gaza. “I was a journalist for the New York Times, I worked for the Associated Press, I worked for ABC News, and to not see that kind of solidarity where journalists always come together when somebody has been taken by the Russian government [for instance], it’s like, what is happening here?”
Director Poh Si Teng in conversation with moderator Thom Powers at CPH:DOX.
Matthew Carey
Anguished by the extreme bloodshed in Gaza, she described making a dramatic career pivot.
“I just felt like whatever I was doing at that time, it didn’t make sense anymore,” she said. “I needed to find something else.”
Her feeling of mission galvanized after Teng attended a speech by Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina who had volunteered his time in Gaza to try to save the lives of children badly injured by Israeli weaponry. The doctor had become an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, declaring it genocide. He spoke about the conflict not from the ivory tower or the pundit’s chair, but as a doctor who has held the shattered bodies of Palestinian children in his hands.
L-R Dr. Thaer Ahmad, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, director Poh Si Teng, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2026 in Park City, Utah.
Josh Telles for Deadline
Teng’s subsequent meeting with Dr. Perlmutter set her on the course to make American Doctor, which focuses on three U.S. physicians who volunteered in Gaza – each from distinct backgrounds. In addition to Dr. Perlmutter, who is Jewish, the other two protagonists are Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American doctor from Chicago, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California with roots in Pakistan’s Parsi minority that follow the Zoroastrian religious tradition.
Teng said when she embarked on the documentary project, she was told, “‘You’re not going to be able to make it. It’s not going to go off the ground… It will never happen’” because of the subject matter. “And I was like, ‘We shall see…’ I get a real thrill when somebody tells me it cannot be done.”
Not that it proved easy. Quite the contrary. She tapped into her life savings of $150,000 to finance the production (Teng addressed her young daughter, who attended the CPH:DOX talk, telling her, “This is all the money I saved for you, my kid, my child, but maybe one day you will understand why.”). She convinced her filmmaking collaborators to halve their usual pay rates, a team that includes Oscar-nominated producer Kirstine Barfod (The Cave), and Oscar-nominated editor and filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki (Black Box Diaries, Instruments of a Beating Heart).
Six months into filming, in the middle of 2024, Teng’s funds had been exhausted. “I was just crushed,” she recalled. But people in Teng’s native Malaysia stepped up.
“A friend of mine from Malaysia, he said, ‘Look, I don’t know how it is in the United States but come back home. We’re not divided on genocide here.’ I made two trips back home to Malaysia… in summer and in the fall, and we raised almost $200,000, donations, cash.”
An injured child receives treatment at Nasser Hospital after an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targeted a tent with multiple missiles resulting in many Palestinians, including two children being injured and two people losing their lives in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis, Gaza on January 5, 2026.
Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images
At that stage, Teng said, she discovered an evolving perspective on the war in Gaza back in the U.S. “By that time, society in the U.S. had shifted and grants were made available to us. In the first half of 2025, all the doors were shut, but… institutions are only made out of people and people have changed. They’re not scared anymore. So that’s what happened.”
American Doctor premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance. Before heading to CPH:DOX, it screened at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece and at True/False in Columbia, MO.
“True/False was our biggest audience. In the Midwest, in the United States, in Missouri — the Missouri Theater, 1,200 [seats],” Teng recounted. “And it was full, it was packed.”
In the film, Dr. Perlmutter urges the medical community to view genocide as a public health issue, not simply as an abstract geopolitical term. The titular physicians condemn the killing of innocent Palestinians in moral terms and criticize the U.S. for its role in the conflict as Israel’s chief military sponsor. That has been revelatory for some audiences, Teng said, citing reaction at True/False.
“When [the screening] ended, people were like, ‘We didn’t know.’ I think people really don’t know the extent of what the U.S. has done,” Teng averred. “And I say the U.S. because it’s so easy to point fingers, ‘Oh, look at Israel.’ True, maybe, but what is our role? What is our role as taxpayers of the United States? What is our role as citizens of countries in the West that have supported or normalized relationships with a country, with Israel, that has this military that’s just massacring and genociding people? So it’s easy. I would implore everybody to look at themselves in the mirror and what their skillset is and what their experience, what they have, and what they can do in this moment in time, and then do something rather than point fingers. And so that is why we made American Doctor… I just thought it’s too much blood on our hands.”
American Doctor screens again at CPH:DOX on Thursday and Friday and will continue a run of festivals going forward. Watermelon Pictures is among the backers of the film, but distribution plans have yet to be determined.