Netflix Debuts Trailer for ‘The Stringer’ Doc on ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo

A cryptic two-sentence electronic mail despatched to veteran battle photographer Gary Knight in late 2022 kicked off the two-year investigation on the coronary heart of The Stringer, the compelling new documentary coming to Netflix Nov. 28 that questions the historical past of one of the vital well-known battle images of all time, generally known as “Napalm Girl.” 

For greater than 50 years, the harrowing Vietnam War picture, which exhibits a nine-year-old woman named Kim Phúc working down a highway bare, her garments burned off in a napalm assault, has been credited to an Associated Press photographer named Nick Út. Út went on to win quite a few awards for the picture, together with the Pulitzer Prize, and the devastating picture galvanized the anti-war motion.

But the picture editor on obligation within 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 picture. And his electronic mail to Knight led to a painful excavation of the previous, charted in The Stringer, that would change the historic document.

The movie’s trailer, launched in the present day, exhibits Knight and his investigative workforce, together with co-producers Fiona Turner and Terri Lichstein, retracing photographers’ steps that day in Vietnam, each on the bottom and thru a 3D recreation of the scene on the highway to Trảng Bàng, the place the napalm fell. It additionally contains snippets of interviews with Robinson, in addition to different photographers and individuals who have been on the scene that day, together with a Vietnamese freelancer photographer — the titular stringer — who claims he was the one who snapped the picture.  

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As Knight narrates over archival footage, nonetheless photos from the period, 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 topic of a lot controversy even earlier than it made its debut on the Sundance Film Festival earlier this 12 months. Út and his legal professional dispute the findings of Knight’s workforce and steadfastly keep that Út took the picture. (Út and the AP each declined to be interviewed for the movie.) Many within the tight-knit group of Vietnam War photographers stand by Út and have questioned Robinson’s motives in coming ahead many years later along with his allegation. One group, World Press Photo, prompted by the movie to conduct its personal investigation into “Napalm Girl,” has stripped Út’s credit score from the picture; the AP has not.

In a function story written by Knight in regards to the investigation and revealed 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 sturdy emotions the investigation unleashed are obvious within the trailer. Of the backlash to the movie, 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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