The Stringer | Courtesy of The String and the Sundance Institute

The Stringer Reframes a Photo that Shaped History

Film challengers authorship of "Napalm Girl" picture

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25 mins read

It’s said that a picture tells a thousand words. The caption often helps, too. But sometimes it reveals a different story, as a single photo credit ignites a bombshell exposé in The Stringer.

The riveting documentary from Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night in Pop) explores a serious allegation made about one of the most famous and influential photographs of all time. The mystery begins when photographer Gary Knight receives some unsettling information from Carl Robinson, who reveals that during his tenure with the Associated Press during the Vietnam War, he was directed to attribute the iconic picture later known as “Napalm Girl” to photographer Nick Ùt. But he now insists that Ùt didn’t take that photo.

It’s a serious allegation. That photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phúc running naked down the dirt road of Tràng Bàng, her mouth agape in horror while escaping the flames of a napalm attack, helped turn the anti-war sentiment. The historic work, The Stringer reminds audiences, won a Pulitzer Prize and proved how a single photo could shape public perception.

The Stringer recognizes that this compelling photo still holds cultural and historical significance, which motivates Knight to seek the truth about its authorship. Nguyen observes as Knight leads fellow journalists Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein, and Lê Vân in piecing together the timeline of events on June 8, 1972. They investigate testimony and gather photographic evidence from other journalists and eyewitnesses who saw the horror at Tràng Bàng.

The investigation inspires a Searching for Sugarman style deep dive as the journalists travel the globe seeking the truth. When they learn the devastating story of Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, a “stringer” who shot photos for the wire service in the field, their search leads to a deeper consideration of the systemic imbalances that leave one person bathed in glory with a place in the history books, and another with twenty bucks and obscurity.

The Stringer proves to be one of the biggest talking points for documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival thanks to its compelling tale and journalistic rigour. However, a week before The Stringer had even premiered, the Associated Press released its own report about the provenance of the photo, standing by the authorship that’s long been attributed to it. The report itself provides a fascinating point of dialogue with the film, as questions of power imbalances and truth in journalism offer greater stakes than the credit line of a single enduring photograph.

POV spoke with The Stringer director Bao Nguyen and participant Gary Knight via Zoom following the film’s premiere to learn more about their investigation, early thoughts of the report, and the implications of their eye-opening tale.

South Vietnamese forces follow after terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, as they run down Route 1 near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places on June 8, 1972. A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. The terrified girl had ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing. The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim’s cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division. (AP Photo/ Nick Ut)
[In running the above credit line, we are not editorializing, but merely following license agreement while using this image for context.]
POV: Pat Mullen
GK: Gary Knight
BN: Bao Nguyen
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

 

POV: Gary, what was going through your mind when you heard the story from Carl Robinson and what compelled you to set this investigation in motion?

GK: When I first heard the accusation, I was shocked. I’d always taken at face value that the authorship of the photograph was unquestionable, partially because of the provenance of AP, but I had no reason to think that it could be or should be challenged. It felt personal, actually, because I grew up with the photography of the Vietnam War and the photographers of the Vietnam War were the photographers that I aspired to be. That was the benchmark for my generation of photographers. But I felt then, as I felt now, that if there were serious detailed allegations about the authorship of something that is so important to photography and so important to journalism, not to mention so important to our memory of that war, that those questions needed to be examined. So, I went to interview Carl and I thought he was a credible witness. We then started on this journey and contacted Bao to join us on it.

 

Bao Nguyen, director of The Stringer, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

POV: Bao, what caught your interest in telling the story?

BN: I remember getting an email very similar to the way that Gary heard the news, but from our producer, Terri Lichstein, and it was pretty vague. She had gotten my contact through a trusted mutual friend and she wanted to do a phone call. I remember hearing that story and the beginnings of their investigation on the phone. I was glad it wasn’t a Zoom because my jaw just dropped. I always looked up to that photograph and the accolades it had received. Being a Vietnamese-American, there are not that many achievements that Vietnamese-Americans can list, such as a Pulitzer Prize or World Press Photo Award. I looked up Gary, Terri, Fiona and learned that they’ve had decades and decades of experience in journalism. The idea of seeking out the truth was important to me. Even though this is disrupting my Vietnamese-American community, because I have a platform to tell stories where there is an audience, I felt a responsibility to help elevate the stories of Vietnamese-Americans and Vietnamese who have been silenced for 50 plus years.

 

POV: When you’re working with a team of journalists doing an investigation, how do you balance that role as a filmmaker? Are you more observing or are you also participating in the investigation even though we don’t see you on screen?

BN: I leave the journalism up to the journalists, in many ways. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve worked on films with varying different subjects and participants, and I knew, again, I was going to leave the investigation up to Gary, Fiona, Terri, and having [Lê] Vân be part of that investigation, the Vietnamese reporter. I knew already that Gary and the work that he’s done with VII Foundation, they were going to enter and investigate this 50-year secret in a very sensitive and delicate way. But having the agency of someone like Vân was important. For me, it was always trying to present the story of these people who were seeking the truth.

 

POV: How do you go about building the visual fabric of a film like this where you’re relying on photographs and the AP is notoriously litigious with copyright, but you need these pictures to make the film? How do you balance working with the archive without, say, tipping off the AP to what you’re looking into?

BN: A lot of these photos are licensable online. They’re so iconic that it’s not like the photos that we show in the film haven’t been seen before. But looking to the visual style of the film, I wanted to make a film that was an ode to photography and an ode to the stillness and impact of single image. I learned so much from Gary about what makes an image so powerful. That influenced the aesthetic of the film and how I approached the way we filmed: just letting a photograph sit there and stand there even though it’s a film, which should be moving pictures. What does it mean when you’re juxtaposing what we shot versus watching a still stand on its own for 10 seconds?

GK: With regard to using some of the images, when you’re doing an investigation like this, there’s a fair use principle that you can employ with some of the images as well.

POV: On the subject of film versus photography, there’s such a powerful moment late in the film when INDEX Forensics presents that diorama sequence that reconstructs the sequence of events at Tràng Bàng using all the photos you collected. It’s sort of like watching Blow-Up meet CSI. What was it like watching that unfold? How did you prepare in case the investigation confirmed Nick Ùt as the photographer?

GK: When you set out on an honest investigation, you don’t want to reinforce your own outcome. The nature of an investigation is that you’re asking questions. We were fully prepared to deal with whatever the forensic team came forward with, and we would’ve told that story. Wherever the story was going to take us from the very first day we started with Carl, we were going to go wherever the truth led us. So, we didn’t have an agenda. We just wanted to ask questions because we felt that was so important. I was blown away actually by the work that they’d done. I think it was incredible.

BN: As the filmmaker, I always enter a film trying to view it through the perspective of an audience member: How do I discover things in this story the same way? And then also interweave it with how the film is made so that the journey that I take as a filmmaker is the same journey that a viewer would do. There’s always a sense of discovery. There’s never a preset assumption of what is going to happen. For me, there was a healthy amount of skepticism still when we were talking to people. It was a bit of he said/she said. It wasn’t until we saw this forensic sequence from INDEX that it cemented my belief in what happened in many ways. I think that’s also the case with many people who’ve watched the film [now that we’ve] premiered.

 

POV: Does it play differently across generations?

GK: I can’t speak to the larger world, of course, but inside my own profession, many amongst the generation of journalists who were in Vietnam are uncomfortable with the very existence of this film. The younger generations are very open to exploring it. I think also in Europe, there’s a tendency to be more open to the film.

BN: The reception is still kind of new, but I imagine a lot of Vietnamese of my parents’ generation, there’s a reluctance to reckon with the past. Because it’s traumatic. There are things that I would have never experienced as someone born in the US. There isn’t that same necessity to reopen those wounds, while for the younger generation, it feels like in order for them to get past this intergenerational trauma, they need to deal with it head on. I’m interested to see how the community responds, but one of our participants in the film, Tran Van Thân, the sound person from NBC, says it very well at the end of the film when he talks about the power of truth and how it sets the moral compass. That should cross generations in many ways. Older generations, younger generations should believe that the truth shouldn’t be corrupted.

POV: On that note, I saw the AP’s report about the authorship of the photo. Are you able to respond to what they’re claiming in their reports? They mention that Fox Butterfield was approached for the film and then didn’t get a follow up. Can you talk about why he might not have had a role in the film?

GK: We spoke to Fox Butterfield. Fiona Turner, one of the producers, spoke to Fox Butterfield multiple times over two years. I think the way that AP characterized our interaction with some of the people they spoke to is not the way that we would characterize those interactions. I can’t really comment on AP’s internal investigation because I don’t know what it is. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what they’ve done. The best kind of investigation is generally an independent external investigation, but I’m not privy to what AP have done. The way they characterized our interaction with various people is not what I recognize.

 

POV: Bao, how do you respond to that report?

BN: I’m pretty sure that they made that report without watching the film. [The AP released its report one week prior to the Sundance premiere.] As I suggest to anyone who is critiquing the film without seeing it, I hope that they have a chance to see it and we can continue this dialogue.

 

POV: The report mentions no-ndisclosure agreements, somewhat as a point of contention. Is that not standard practice in documentary for a work in progress that you’d sign an NDA?

BN: In documentary, certainly most, if not all, the projects that I’ve done in the past four years or so have required me to sign an NDA before I get approached with anything.

GK: NDAs in the documentary film world, their existence is conventional. In the journalism world, it’s slightly different. But we asked AP [for comment] in writing at least two occasions last year, once to the CEO and board chair and once to the vice president of communications. They requested to see all of our research without preconditions. I know of no other circumstance in journalism where any investigating media would agree to share all of their research with the people who are part of the investigation without preconditions.

But we wanted to collaborate with AP, so we asked them if they would agree to sign an embargo solely so that they would not preempt or use our research in their own stories before the film was shown here or wherever it was going to be premiered. They declined to do that. We didn’t ask them not to write about Tràng Bàng or the photograph. Of course, that would be absurd. They’ve made films and written books about it. It was simply to protect our own proprietorial research. With NDAs for potential eyewitnesses, one or two eyewitnesses who we spoke to said, “We will only talk to you if we see your research.” And again, we said, “Well, we can share our research with you if you agree not to publish it.” That’s all it was about. It was to make sure that we were the first people to publish our own research.

POV: That’s fair. But I think what’s really interesting too about the film is that it’s a case study with one photograph, but it’s also a much larger story than one picture. Regardless of the authorship of this one picture, what are some of the things that audiences could take away from this investigation?

BN: I hope that, especially personally from the Vietnamese American community who were the ones trying to tell their own stories as journalists during the war, that they have the opportunity to continue to speak out about their own truths and tell their own stories and have those stories feel like they have value. A lot of Vietnamese who came over to America felt like they didn’t have value. That was one of the reasons I decided to be a filmmaker, to be honest. I remember watching this Oliver Stone movie, Heaven & Earth, with my parents. And when my mom sees Le Ly Haslip’s character wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress and going to American Supermarket, that’s the first time my mom saw herself on screen.

I hope that our community, the Vietnamese-American community, sees this film on a big screen, sees that Nghệ’s story has value—it’s always had value—sees it’s important for him to feel like it has value. And for many other marginalized communities around the world, not just in America, to see that.

GK: I think addressing the power imbalance that exists in journalism is really important here. This story is a metaphor for that. That power imbalance still exists: Palestinian journalists, Burmese journalists, journalists from the global south and the majority world are suffering from that power imbalance today. I think that’s really important to speak about, and truth in journalism. As journalists, we are privileged to hold everybody else in society to account, whether that’s our church leaders, our faith leaders, our corporate leaders, our political leaders, or our civic leaders. If there are serious questions about our own professionalism and our own practice, we should be the first people to be open about that, transparent about that, and turn the camera on ourselves. If we can’t do that, we have no business being journalists.

 

POV: Running with that thought, how has this film factored into your understanding of truth and images?

BN:  There’s a distinction in terms of a journalist and a documentary filmmaker: I’m presenting a story of a journalistic investigation. I’m always wanting the audience to discover and experience their own sense of truth in any film. It’s always been about presenting a story, presenting the life and emotion of these individuals and having them present their own truths. From that, an audience can figure out what they get from the film.

GK: It’s important to state that we are not questioning the veracity of the photograph. What happened to Kim Phúc, her brother, and cousins is real, and that photograph is real, and what it shows is real. The experience of Vietnamese civilians in that war, what it shows is real. That’s not under question at all. It’s simply a question about authorship.

The Stringer premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Pat Mullen is the publisher of POV Magazine. He holds a Master’s in Film Studies from Carleton University where his research focused on adaptation and Canadian cinema. Pat has also contributed to outlets including The Canadian Encyclopedia, Paste, That Shelf, Sharp, Xtra, and Complex. He is the vice president of the Toronto Film Critics Association and an international voter for the Golden Globe Awards.

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