Fittingly framed by the silver screen, Zach Woods moderates the Q&A for Poh Si Teng’s unflinching documentary American Doctor with a careful, knowing eye on the audience.

“What have you learned about bearing the unbearable?” he inquires softly to the bated breath of a packed theater crowd.

A heavy energy lingers in the room after the screening, emotion palpable. Some audience members are still wiping tears from their eyes after watching the harrowing film.

Teng’s three subjects come to Gaza from three different American lives. Feroze Sidhwa does trauma surgery in California; his family is Pakistani-Parsi. Thaer Ahmad, Palestinian American, works emergency medicine in Chicago. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon, practices in North Carolina.

They make two trips, one on either side of the January 2025 ceasefire. It is a chance to see the destruction and carnage that has been inflicted on the Palestinian people under Netanyahu’s cruel regime.

Utilizing classic cinéma vérité techniques, the film puts us inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where the doctors worked: in the surgical theaters, in the wards, in the corridors between them.

The film’s editing is meticulous; each cut feels deliberate, like fine needlepoint stitching. Teng cuts between the interviews the doctors give after returning to the States and the private conversations that surround them. Long shots showing the hospital’s geography, with quick cuts capturing the destruction, are interspersed with news reels.

We are brought into the hospital. We enter the doctors’ homes. We meet their families. And we also encounter the horror that the Palestinian children experience every day.

The film is confrontational and graphic, showing the brutality of war without any glamour or celebration. In one instance, it is mentioned that there was not enough pain medicine to give to the people whose legs had been blown off.

One girl I remember in particular sat scared and gasping for air. Her legs and arms were mutilated from explosions. Her face was panicked and shocked as she struggled to breathe.

You could see her experiencing the trauma of losing her limbs in real time, her life changed forever.

In another scene, a child who was set for release was incinerated by one of many bombs shot at the hospital. The film notes, of course, that hitting a hospital violates the Geneva Convention, as international law has protected hospitals and medical staff since 1864. We are witnessing war crimes.

There is no way to shoot one hundred bullets into an ambulance accidentally. These are orchestrated, planned, and deliberate moves of extreme cruelty, and they are enacted every minute of every day in Gaza. In this documentary, Poh Si Teng shows us the truth behind the propaganda, showing what many do not want us to see.

In the film, amidst the flurry of the hospital, Dr. Sidhwa says: “Three physicians working on one little girl for two and a half hours, and she’s probably going to lose her right leg, her left leg, and her left arm.”

I wept in the theater upon seeing the bodies of those mangled children.

And amidst all of that ash and fire and blood and pain and rubble, one wonders:

What is Gabe from The Office doing here?

You might ask, where else would he be?

Zach Woods, known mostly for his comedic roles, has always been an advocate and ally. From his work with Much Love Animal Rescue to standing at a Los Angeles vigil for Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse shot by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis this January, Zach shows support for these causes with great passion.

Zach has said in the past that he “would much rather have somebody that has some fight and conviction in them,” showing his admiration for people who stand up for their beliefs.

Woods is Jewish. You can also see him in a show like Avenue 5 wearing a yarmulke to the space funeral. As a Jewish person myself, I do not think it is antisemitic for me to call what is being done in Gaza cruel or brutal.

I do not think it is hate speech to criticize a government regime such as this one in the same way that I do not feel that someone like Mark Ruffalo should be accused of antisemitism for voicing his concerns.

So… what is Gabe Susan Lewis doing there?

The answer is simple: He’s doing his goddamn civic duty.

Who could look into the eyes of a poor crying, hyperventilating child and not want to help?

Sitting there in a sky blue shirt and matching socks, Zach moderates the discussion with gentle ease. I could tell he appreciated the gravity of what he was doing.

This is Zach Woods in his element: moderating a discussion with a diverse group of doctors who provide medical aid to the people of Gaza and the director who filmed them. He has a talent for interviewing people. He has a way of making people who don’t speak much, like me, want to chime in and talk.

“You guys go into buildings that are so much bigger than you, that are so aflamed, and confront so much pain. And I guess I have a question, which is, what have you learned about bearing the unbearable? What allows you to continue to do that?” he asks the three doctors on the panel.

Dr. Ahmad answers by way of the Qur’an. He is Muslim, he tells the room, and there is a verse he returns to in the moments that feel unbearable, moments when he did not want to wake up and look at his phone: God does not place a burden on the soul that it can’t handle.

Dr. Perlmutter told the story of visiting a mass grave and was told about a man and how “he witnessed two kids that were buried alive with their hands tied behind their back.” The unimaginable terror. Appalling.

Some people have said after watching this film that it was the first time they had ever thought about Palestinians having families before.

In the film, a child in Gaza is asked how many kinds of birds he knows. He answers: “I know quadcopter, helicopter, Apache, F-16, and F-35.”

Let’s pause for a second.

The doctors in the film tend to the wounds with methodical dedication. Their care becomes a lifeline for scared children to cling to amid the pain. To quote Sylvia Plath: “They tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.”

The voices of these victims are being silenced in deliberate ways. They don’t want people to watch this documentary. For one obvious example, they bombed the balcony at Nasser Hospital that the crew used to upload footage each day; the strike killed 22 people, among them journalists and medical workers. Talk about adding insult to injury.

And so amidst all of that, Zach Woods asks some interesting questions. What can we learn about bearing the unbearable? What does it mean to walk into a building or a situation larger than yourself? How do we confront such pain?

Well… sometimes you have no choice. And, as Dr. Ahmad mentioned in the Q&A, a cup of tea and nice company amid all that war and wreckage can go a long way.

Director Poh Si Teng has said, “That’s what I wanted to show: an honest film about what it takes, and what it does to you, to stand up, and the importance of it.”

This documentary is an all-encompassing, immersive feat that tackles one of the most pressing human rights violations in the world today.

Under Zach’s moderation, the post-documentary screening Q&A was a thoughtful and sensitive examination of how one learns to carry the weight of multiple traumas. It was easy to see how passionately Zach felt about it all.

Through this panel, he invited us to do the same. This was his cause. This issue had captured his whole heart; you could see it written all over his face, driving him to engage in this thoughtful discussion and inviting us into introspection. I felt honored to be a part of that for the evening.

At the beginning of the discussion, Zach asked, “What have you learned about bearing the unbearable?” And the simplest answer is that you do, in fact, learn to bear it.

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• Runtime: 93 minutes
• Screening: Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles, Auditorium 1 — 5:20 p.m., August 22
• Featuring: Mark Perlmutter, Feroze Sidhwa, Thaer Ahmad
• Director: Poh Si Teng
• Panel moderated by Zach Woods

Photo courtesy of press materials from MPI Media