A cryptic two-sentence email sent to veteran conflict photographer Gary Knight in late 2022 kicked off the two-year investigation at the heart of The Stringer, the compelling new documentary coming to Netflix Nov. 28 that questions the history of one of the most famous war photographs of all time, known as “Napalm Girl.”
For more than 50 years, the harrowing Vietnam War image, which shows a nine-year-old girl named Kim Phúc running down a road naked, her clothes burned off in a napalm attack, has been credited to an Associated Press photographer named Nick Út. Út went on to win numerous awards for the photo, including the Pulitzer Prize, and the devastating image galvanized the anti-war movement.
But the photo editor on duty in the AP’s Saigon bureau the day it was taken in 1972, Carl Robinson, now says Út was not the one who took the celebrated photo. And his email to Knight led to a painful excavation of the past, charted in The Stringer, that could change the historical record.
The film’s trailer, released today, shows Knight and his investigative team, including co-producers Fiona Turner and Terri Lichstein, retracing photographers’ steps that day in Vietnam, both on the ground and through a 3D recreation of the scene on the road to Trảng Bàng, where the napalm fell. It also includes snippets of interviews with Robinson, as well as other photographers and people who were on the scene that day, including a Vietnamese freelancer photographer — the titular stringer — who claims he was the one who snapped the photo.
As Knight narrates over archival footage, still images from the era, and tearful interviews, “It matters who pressed the shutter, not just for one man’s legacy but for what it says about who gets remembered and who gets erased.”
The Stringer was the subject of much controversy even before it made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Út and his attorney dispute the findings of Knight’s team and steadfastly maintain that Út took the photo. (Út and the AP both declined to be interviewed for the film.) Many in the tight-knit community of Vietnam War photographers stand by Út and have questioned Robinson’s motives in coming forward decades later with his allegation. One organization, World Press Photo, prompted by the film to conduct its own investigation into “Napalm Girl,” has stripped Út’s credit from the photo; the AP has not.
In a feature story written by Knight about the investigation and published by Rolling Stone in August, he writes of the “countless Vietnamese photographers and reporters [who] worked in anonymity during the Vietnam War, not out of choice but because their work was not credited at all, or was credited to others. . . . The politics of race and power, and the suffocating presence of the U.S. military, meant they were outsiders in their own country; they knew no one would listen, because they weren’t equal.”
The strong feelings the investigation unleashed are apparent in the trailer. Of the backlash to the film, Knight writes: “There have been suggestions by some journalists that this story should not have been told; that in this moment when journalism is being so savagely undermined by the very forces it seeks to hold to account, the last thing we need is to reveal our own failures. But journalism is essential to democracy, and it is in the interests of both the press and the public that trust in the Fourth Estate is repaired. The passage of time may increase the anguish of self-examination, but the search for truth is always worth the cost.”
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