As far as documentaries go, Bao Nguyen’s “The Stringer” is a relatively straightforward work of investigative reportage. Its objective? To uncover the truth behind “The Terror of War,” a.k.a. “Napalm Girl,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a naked Vietnamese girl who is fleeing her village with other children in the aftermath of a 1972 napalm attack.
The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut was credited with taking the picture, but “The Stringer” contends that a photo editor intentionally misidentified the photographer, knowing that the image was actually the work of a local stringer, or freelancer. Ut, the documentary explains, had taken a similar picture from a different angle, and he maintains that he took the photo.
The documentary begins with revelations from another editor who was in the room when the decision was made — and snowballs into a search for the real photographer, whom the film argues is Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a Vietnamese man currently living in California. (After an internal investigation, The Associated Press said in May that it would continue to credit the photo to Ut.)
The photographer Gary Knight is the documentary’s guiding sleuth, assisted by the journalists Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein and Le Van. Frankly, this hunt isn’t particularly thrilling, despite the premise’s potential to create intriguing parallels between Nghe’s erasure and the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by U.S. forces during the war.
The documentary, with its moody score and medley of talking heads, strives to create an atmosphere of injustice over the crediting dispute. Though some may be compelled to believe Nghe took the photograph, given the egregiously bad hands given to both freelancers and people in the global south, there’s also something rotten about a documentary that tries (and fails) to spin such a typical drama into an epic of villainy and regret. Ultimately, the evidence is still fuzzy, reminding us that the truth-seekers may have cut corners of their own.
The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo Rated R for footage of wartime violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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