‘The Stringer’: Sundance Review

Dir. Bao Nguyen. US. 2025. 109 mins

Casting his lens back to Saigon,1972, director Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night In Pop) investigates the eye behind of one of the most famous photographs ever taken, delivering a documentary on authorship and the closed ranks of the white, male Vietnam War press corps. On the first part, authorship, The Stringer is strong and illustrative as to why it still matters so much, five decades later. On the latter, the at-best paternalistic, colonial attitudes of the flown-in correspondents and agencies vis a vis local staff and ‘stringers’, it isn’t quite tough enough.

A valuable document for festival and specialist play

The photograph in question captures the South Vietnamese forces’ mistaken bombing of Trang Bang village on June 8, 1972, napalming the villagers and children including nine year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi who is shown running naked down the highway, screaming in agony. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo was credited by Saigon Associated Press chief Horst Faas to agency contract photographer Nick Ut; the documentary is pretty clear his authorship is questionable, even though AP has conducted its own investigation and says says he did take it. It’s fair to say Ut has taken full advantage of the fame of the photograph in his lifetime. Yet how is it possible to prove it wasn’t his?

War photography is, and was particularly then, a tough, rarified, predominantly masculine game. A documentary that leaves you longing for some of the hard cut and thrust of the field won’t be a dynamic commercial contender, but The Stringer’s dogged probing makes it a valuable document for festival and specialist play, alongside engaged journalistic debate. It’s led by Gary Knight, a former war photographer who now runs the VII Foundation, devoted to visual reportage and the co-production entity on The Stringer. Even he, though, as on-camera investigator, can’t get famous Vietnam journalists like Peter Arnett to break ranks on Horst Faas, who probably acted with good intentions - Ut’s brother, also a photographer, had died in combat working for AP. Also, though, Ut was the AP-accrediteded stringer, so it worked out best for everyone.

Knight is a calm and knowledgable presence, guiding us quickly through the history of the shot and introducing us to whistleblower Carl Robinson, an AP desk editor in Saigon on that day. He also tracks the historical importance of the photograph: ‘napalm girl’ helped turn the tide of public opinion in the US, so much so that US president Nixon thought it was a fix. Robinson, a Westerner but a local hire, which did not give him status within the army of press in Saigon at that time, recalls how he was ordered to switch Ut’s name onto the photograph. He did what he was told, but says it has haunted him ever since.

Who took the shot, though, if Ut did not? Would that person still be alive? Ut is, but declines to comment, as does Arnett, though British journalist and author Jon Swain does take part. Here’s where The Stringer is at its smartest and most involving, as a team from Index Investigations in Paris painstakingly reassemble what went on that day and Knight is given a name to follow up on. The chase is suddenly on – although there’s a little too much padding in the 109 minute runtime to quicken the pulse, leading to a sluggish sense of editing and score.

They called Vietnam the first media war and it’s easy to assume that times have changed: The Stringer illustrates precisely how they have not. Smartphones may be replacing the Pentax and the 35mm film contact sheet, but it’s still the locals on the ground who run the most risks while the well-paid Western correspondents jet in and out, leaving them behind. 

And, as it often turns out in life, it hard to find a villain: the misguided moral motivations and baked-in superiority of the Western Saigon press corps came from another time. Now, though, Knight points out that there is always a chance to right past injustices, even as old age becomes the biggest threat to the process. And here’s where the bad guy is smoked out of the swaggering Saigon press corps. AP doesn’t comes out of The Stringer well. The practices employed and enjoyed by Faas and his cohort were undoubtedly discriminatory, even if they were commonplace. But AP – quick to be sanctimonious recently when it came to a mild photoshop on a photograph by Kate Middleton – refused to engage with Knight and his team on one of its prized possessions, the most famous photograph possibly ever taken. It wanted full access to materials without pre-conditions, and conducted its own investigation, reinforcing Ut’s authorship. Some legacies still matter more than others.