EXCLUSIVE: One of the boldest documentaries of the year is about to reach theaters, the award-winning American Doctor.

The film directed by Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Poh Si Teng centers on three American physicians of differing backgrounds who volunteered their services in besieged hospitals in Gaza, treating Palestinian children grievously injured in Israel’s sustained bombardment and invasion of the occupied territory. American Doctor will open in New York and Toronto on August 14, followed by Los Angeles a week later. The Watermelon Pictures release will open in Atlanta, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Francisco on August 28, followed by an expansion to more cities in September.

We have your first look at the film in the exclusive trailer above.

When the three physicians – Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who is Jewish, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American, and Pakistani American Dr. Feroze Sidhwa – “enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth,” notes the program guide for CPH:DOX, the festival in Copenhagen where American Doctor screened in March. The documentary follows the doctors on the ground and in the operating theater in Gaza and back home in the U.S. where they work the halls of Congress and appear on American media to make the moral case against Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians, health care workers, and journalists. They are just as outspoken arguing that the American government should not support Israel’s military operation in Gaza with billions of dollars in aid.

“We do not have to accept that as Americans,” Dr. Sidhwa says in the trailer. “The United States could stop sending jet fuel, bombs, all sorts of weapons [to Israel]. This is a political problem; we need a political solution.”

American Doctor is directed and produced by Poh Si Teng (St. Louis Superman, Patrice: The Movie) and produced by Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Kirstine Barfod (The Cave), and Reed Haddad. The documentary won audience awards at the Sydney Film Festival in Australia and the Biografilm festival in Bologna, Italy, and a Special Mention at CPH:DOX in the HUMAN:RIGHTS AWARD category, among other honors around the world.

Deadline spoke with Teng and the doctors at Sundance, where American Doctor premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition. They did not mince words about what they witnessed in Gaza.

“We’ve all been to multiple mass casualty events throughout the world,” Dr. Perlmutter told us. “Feroze has been in Ukraine, we [Perlmutter and Ahmad] 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.”

In a talk at CPH:DOX with TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers, Teng said when she first proposed making the film, she didn’t get much encouragement. The director said 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.”

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