Controversial documentary The Stringer investigates famous Vietnam War photo

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Nick Ut (with framed picture), flanked by Kim Phuc, known as the "Napalm Girl", shows his Vietnam war photo as they wait to meet Pope Francis in St Peter's Square, Vatican City in May 2022. Photo / Getty Images

The Stringer at Sundance alleges the famed Vietnam War photo The Terror of War, or Napalm Girl, was not taken by Nick Ut. The AP and Ut deny the claims.

Ten days before the premiere of the documentary The Stringer at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night, the Associated Press published an extraordinary 23-page report of a six-month investigation rebutting the movie’s premise, without having seen a second of footage.

The Stringer questions whether the world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked 9-year-old girl running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War was attributed to the correct photographer. It’s also the only film to arrive at this year’s Sundance under a cloud of controversy, with a global news organisation fighting its stunning claims and a lawyer for the image’s credited photographer seeking to block its screening and threatening a defamation suit.

Called by one news outlet “the most important photo of the 20th century”, the image, known as The Terror of War or Napalm Girl, was seen on the front pages of newspapers by tens of millions of people within 24 hours of it being taken. It has been credited – some say apocryphally – with fuelling anti-war protests and accelerating the US withdrawal from Vietnam months later. It was so impactful that President Richard M. Nixon questioned whether it had been “fixed,” as heard on the Watergate tapes.

The legitimacy of the image, taken on June 8, 1972, is not up for debate. It shows five children fleeing for their lives after US-backed South Vietnamese forces dropped chemical bombs on Trang Bang, a village in its own territory where Viet Cong were mistakenly believed to be hiding out. At the centre is the naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who had torn off what remained of her clothes after they were incinerated by napalm, along with much of the skin on her arm and back. She is crying in agony and fear, her arms outstretched.

Nick Ut, then a 21-year-old Vietnamese AP staff photographer, was there on assignment, alongside a handful of other journalists for print and TV. He has recounted time and again over 50-plus years the story of making that photo.

But what if, the documentary asks, Ut didn’t take the photograph – a claim that Ut, 73, vigorously denies?

The Stringer director Bao Nguyen (left) with Nguyen Than Nghe at the film's premiere during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Photo / Getty Images

What if the entire lifetime of accolades and fortune had gone to someone else, a Vietnamese freelance photographer – or “stringer” – newly identified in the film?

What if that photo credit was not only incorrect, but also not a mistake? What if, instead, it was a choice made by a lionised AP veteran working in the Saigon bureau of one of the biggest and most respected news sources in the world?

The film from Vietnamese American director Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night in Pop, Be Water) is filled with forensic analysis of 50-plus-year-old photographs and videos from that day. It also features a 3D reconstruction of the timeline conducted by Index, a nonprofit, independent agency in France that investigates matters of public interest, “using advanced imaging and information technology”, according to its website.

The two-year investigation was headed up by former war photographer Gary Knight, who also leads the nonprofit VII Foundation, which educates “majority-world” journalists from the Global South.

The AP firmly stands behind Ut and released a statement along with its report reasserting that it had spoken with seven eyewitnesses and four other people with detailed knowledge of the AP’s Vietnam operation in the ′70s, as well as the photograph, and had come away convinced.

“Our research supports the historical account that Nick Ut took this picture,” the statement reads. “In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, AP has no reason to believe this photo was taken by anyone other than Ut.”

Knight told the Washington Post that the first time he heard rumours that Ut did not take the photograph was 11 or 12 years ago, through a friend who had been told the shocking story at a reunion of Vietnam veteran journalists. The source was Carl Robinson, the photo editor in AP’s Saigon bureau who had written Ut’s name in the caption. Knight attempted to pursue the story then but says he was “put off” it by his friend and others in the photojournalism community. Then, in December 2022, he says, a member of his staff forwarded an email that had come into the junk folder at the VII Foundation.

It was from Robinson. “I have carried this burden for 50 years and never gone public,” it read. “I was the AP’s Saigon photo editor back in 1972 ... Simply put, Nick didn’t really take that famous photograph. It was actually [a] stringer, or freelancer.”

A photo from Trang Bang, Vietnam, taken in June 1972, in which a Vietnamese girl has her eyes treated and a crying boy covers his eyes after an accidental napalm attack against their village by government aircraft. Photo / Getty Images

The film documents Knight meeting with Robinson in Ho Chi Minh City, not knowing whether he could trust him. Robinson told him that, on the day of the bombing, he received film from Ut and two Vietnamese stringers, including one whose name he couldn’t recall who wasn’t a regular AP freelancer, and had labelled the negatives meticulously, per AP standards.

“The full-on front picture was from a stringer. I checked his name,” he says. He selected a side view of Phuc taken by Ut to send to headquarters in New York because he believed that the nudity of the front-facing photograph would violate AP policies. Then, the AP’s venerated Saigon bureau chief, two-time Pulitzer winner Horst Faas, returned from lunch and chose the Napalm Girl photo instead.

Much of Robinson’s account is echoed in the AP report, but not what he says next. He says he checked the labels and the now-famous photograph had been taken by the stringer but, he says in the film, “I glanced over to the notebook [to check the name], and Horst Faas, who had been standing right next to me said, ‘Nick Ut. Make it Nick Ut.’ Those have been with me the rest of my life, those words. I’ve struggled with that for the rest of my life.”

The AP report says that Robinson “was described as disgruntled by former colleagues inside and outside of the company” and that he was dismissed in 1978. The film questions, as does the AP report, why Robinson took all these years to come forward and made no mention of it in his 2020 memoir. He had a Vietnamese wife and two kids and didn’t want to lose his job, he says in the film. But now he’s in his 80s. He wanted to find the stringer to apologise to him before he died, and he wanted Knight’s help.

As the film progresses, the team, which includes journalists Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein and Le Van in Vietnam, locates a man, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a trained military photographer who says he drove Ut to the site of the bombing that day. He names the camera he used and where he was standing. He says that he sold two rolls of film to the AP and alleges that “the big boss there” gave him $20, two rolls of free film and a print of the “Napalm Girl” photo, saying he would buy that one and not the rest.

But Nghe’s wife tore it up after he brought it home because she didn’t want their young children looking at such a scary image, according to his daughter Jannie Nguyen, who’s also in the film. She remembers sneaking up on a ladder to look at the photograph, which her dad had placed on top of the fridge, then seeing the image in newspapers later.

In one of the film’s most compelling interviews, Tran Van Than, who was a sound man for NBC News on the road outside Trang Bang, says he went with Nghe, his brother-in-law, to the AP office, which was right next to NBC’s. Completely sharp at 92, he says he went inside to sell the film while his brother-in-law waited outside.

“The buyer of the film was Mr Horst Faas,” he says, then repeats the name, saying he doesn’t know how to spell it in English. After the film was developed, he alleges, Faas “cut off the one of the burned girl, set it aside and said, ‘I’ll buy this film.’ He gave me $20 for the one he bought and an 8-by-10 photo of the burned girl.” He walked outside and gave everything to Nghe.

Photojournalist Nick Ut at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards in Los Angeles in June 2023. Photo / Getty Images

He never came forward, he says, because he knew his bureau chief and Faas were close friends. “I can open my mouth,” he says, “[but] if I get fired, how can my family live? I had to keep my mouth shut for more than 50 years. My conscience is not at peace.” (No Vietnamese journalist other than Ut is cited in the AP report.)

The filmmakers ask the same question as the AP report: why would Faas, a celebrated bureau chief who prided himself on being fair to freelancers, do something that would drive them to competitors, if it got out? In the film, Robinson speculates that Faas felt guilty for the death of Ut’s brother, Huynh Thanh My, on an assignment Faas had given him.

According to the AP report and other sources, after the funeral, 14-year-old Ut came to the office and asked Faas for a job to support his family. Faas hired him to work in the darkroom, which is how he learned about photo composition without formal training. “Horst was torn up about My’s death, and I thought that this was his way of paying tribute to him,” Robinson says in the film.

Faas died in 2012. Yuichi “Jackson” Ishizaki, the AP darkroom editor, died in 1986.

In an email response to questions from the Post, AP spokesman Patrick Maks said that officials from the outlet are aware of the film’s Sundance premiere but had not seen it. The film includes a sequence in which Knight goes to the AP office in London in June to present the film’s findings. Knight told the Post that he wanted to collaborate with the AP and get access to its archives. The AP wanted to see the film’s research. Knight said he would show it only if the organisation agreed to an embargo, meaning that the AP couldn’t report on the film’s findings until after its premiere. The AP refused.

“We have asked repeatedly to see the film without the preconditions the filmmakers required, including an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] and embargo,” Maks wrote. “Agreeing to any such preconditions would prevent us from investigating fully and taking any corrective action that might be needed, as we explained to the filmmakers and noted in our report. As a fact-based news organisation, we cannot be restricted from correcting the record if we become aware of new facts.”

Maks said the news organisation was ready to review any evidence presented in the film and is planning to “update our report as new information becomes available”.

Knight says the filmmakers conducted 55 interviews, 45 of which were on the record, including with journalists who were on the ground in 1972 and named in the AP report, as well as some Vietnamese witnesses who were not. What the film does not include are interviews with Ut and Phuc – who has said that she has no memories of the attack, but that her uncle confirmed Ut was the photographer, according to the AP report.

Kim Phuc became famous after being pictured as a child during the Vietnam War. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Knight says he reached out to Phuc twice and to Ut 16 times, including through friends and people in Vietnam who knew him.

Why revisit the image’s provenance, which has never been disputed, now?

The filmmakers say their objective, primarily, is truth. The job of journalists is to hold powerful people to account, Knight said, so if there is a question about the behaviour of journalists or truth in journalism, it would be hypocritical not to examine it.

“We have to scrutinise our own behaviour and examine the way that we practice journalism and the way that we treat the more vulnerable journalists in our community,” he said. “We have to ask tough questions of ourselves. We can’t go out there and hold everyone else to account if we can’t hold ourselves to account.”

He continued: “No Vietnamese had any agency in this process. As I say in the film, I feel that Nick was also a victim of this, not just Nghe.”

Nghe, who is 87, has lived a humble life in obscurity and is recovering from a recent stroke with his daughter in California. He told Knight that, even at a time of analogue cameras, he knew he had taken an incredible photo the moment he took it.

The film’s director, Bao Nguyen, says that he’s not surprised Nghe didn’t fight for credit. “Maybe people of certain generations in certain parts of the majority culture think, ‘Why aren’t people speaking up?’” he says. “But I think, for a lot of people, especially in my parents’ generation and older Vietnamese, it’s not expected, and it’s not necessarily their priority. The priority of immigrants and refugees is to take care of their families first.” Still, he said he remained skeptical until seeing the Index forensics report.

As for Nghe, he’s mostly recovered and was on the ground at Sundance for the premiere. A member of the film team “picked him up from the airport and took a photo, and he just had the biggest smile on his face”, Bao Nguyen said.

“I mean, whatever comes out of this, whatever the AP and these organisations decide, I’m happy that we were able to tell his story and share it with the world. And I think he’s happy about that, as well.”