In the weeks before a premiere at a fall film festival, most directors are racing the clock to finish a final edit or praying to their respective higher powers. In the run-up to the Toronto Film Festival, however, Roshan Sethi — the filmmaker behind The Surgeon, one of TIFF’s hottest sales titles starring Michelle Yeoh — was in the hospital.
Don’t worry. Sethi is in good health. For roughly two months of every year, Sethi is on call at Boston’s Mass General Brigham. In addition to co-creating the Fox medical series The Resident and directing three feature films, he is a practicing radiation oncologist. (When talking over a mid-August evening about his new movie, Sethi had to pause mid-interview to take a call from the hospital, a first for this reporter.) “I decided to do it in the weeks before TIFF because it just felt to me like there wasn’t that much going on,” says Sethi, differentiating himself from pretty much every other independent filmmaker on the planet.
It was only a year earlier, at the top of 2025, when Sethi was writing The Surgeon in the hours before starting his 8 a.m. shift at the hospital. While he would often spend his off hours writing during his residency, the filmmaker no longer does his creative work during the weeks when he is back in the medical field. “I’m too old for that now,” he says with a laugh. But he was taken with the idea of an action film set around a highly skilled surgeon and finished the screenplay in only 10 days.
