Award-Winning ‘American Doctor’ Acquired By Watermelon Pictures

EXCLUSIVE: Watermelon Pictures has acquired North American distribution rights to American Doctor, the award-winning documentary about three U.S. physicians who volunteered to treat grievously wounded Palestinian children in Gaza.

Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Poh Si Teng (St. Louis Superman, Patrice: The Movie) directed the film, which just won the Tom Rankin Audience Award at the Full Frame festival in Durham, NC. It won the audience award and the Michael Sullivan Frontline Award for Journalism at Salem Film Fest in Massachusetts, and at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, it won the prestigious Amnesty International Award and the Peter Wintonick Audience Award. At CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, American Doctor earned an honorable mention in the HUMAN:RIGHTS AWARD category.

Watermelon Pictures, the company founded by brothers Badie and Hamza Ali, earned an Oscar nomination this year for The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, a film set in Gaza based on the true story of a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in 2024 by invading Israeli forces. The physicians of American Doctor risked their lives to perform emergency surgeries on children like Hind Rajab who have been gravely injured in shelling, bombing and other attacks by the Israel Defense Forces.

The three prominent physicians – Palestinian American Dr. Thaer Ahmad, Jewish American Dr. Mark Perlmutter, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa who is of Zoroastrian background — are “friends who couldn’t be more different but are bound by the shared oath to save lives,” notes a synopsis. They are united in their condemnation of Israel’s decimation of Gaza launched in retaliation for the October 7^th Hamas terror attack on Israel. UNICEF reports at least 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or wounded in Gaza since October 2023.

The documentary, “filmed in unfolding, on-the-ground scenes,” follows the physicians “from a Gazan hospital under siege, to the halls of Congress. Together they fight to keep a promise to their Palestinian colleagues and patients, to continue the struggle where it matters most: the United States.”

“Poh Si Teng has created something truly powerful,” commented Watermelon Pictures cofounder Hamza Ali. “American Doctor is a testament to her vision and courage as a filmmaker, and to the importance of the story she has chosen to tell. We are honored to partner with Poh and bring this extraordinary film to audiences across North America.”

In a statement, Teng said, “It is an incredible honor to work with Hamza Ali and the entire team from Watermelon Pictures. They believed in our film while we were still making it, through such a daunting journey, and that belief carried us. It means the world to me and to everyone who gave so much to this film. Together, we are going to bring the message of American Doctor home.”

The acquisition deal was negotiated by Watermelon Pictures’ Hamza Ali, with Poh Si Teng, founder of Tiny Boxer Films, producer Kirstine Barfod, and executive producer Simon Kilmurry. Cinetic Media handled domestic sales, while Autlook Filmsales is overseeing international sales, including at Marché Du Film in Cannes.

American Doctor is a Tiny Boxer Films production and is produced by Poh Si Teng, Oscar nominee Kirstine Barfod (The Cave) and Reem Haddad. The film is edited by Christopher White and Oscar nominee Ema Ryan Yamazaki (Black Box Diaries, Instruments of a Beating Heart).

Co-producers are Mohammed Sawwaf and Kasper Lykke Schultz, with executive producers Simon Kilmurry, Hamza Ali, Glennon Doyle, Rasha Mansouri, Hassan Elmasry, Poh Si Teng, Rami Elghandour, Andreas Dalsgaard, Mehdi Hasan, Juan Pablo Raymond and Kiran Alvi. The original score is composed by Suad Bushnaq, and the original song “Astral Light” is composed and performed by Suvo Sur, featuring Poh Si Teng on vocals.

At the Sundance Film Festival, where American Doctor premiered, Teng and the physicians came to Deadline’s Studio.

“American Doctor is like The Pitt,” Teng told us. “The difference is it’s real and it’s set in Gaza.”

Dr. Perlmutter commented, “We’ve all been to multiple mass casualty events throughout the world. Feroze has been in Ukraine, we [Thaer and Perlmutter] have both been to Haiti. Our experience in Gaza was collectively far worse than all of those other experiences combined, even 9/11. We witnessed the largest pediatric homicide in our lifetimes, and that’s hard to get over. The sheer volume of the pediatric carnage that we saw is indescribable.”

The doctors have been outspoken in urging Americans to consider how their tax dollars have been used to fund Israel’s military operations. According to the Watson School of International Affairs at Brown University, the U.S. has provided more than $21 billion in aid to the Israeli military since October 7^th, 2023.

“What we saw [in Gaza] was really just a shocking level of killing, of maiming, of starvation, of destruction of the healthcare system, of the targeting of our own colleagues, the targeting of pregnancy itself, the targeting of childhood itself,” Dr. Sidhwa told Deadline. “And we just don’t think that those are things that Americans want to be subsidizing somewhere else. I think the American people want to know what’s going on so that they can make a moral choice.”