Netflix’s The Stringer documentary challenges historical past of well-known ‘Napalm Girl’ {photograph}

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It will be the most well-known {photograph} ever taken.

On June 8, 1972, in a small village in southeastern Vietnam, a nine-year-old woman named Phan Thi Kim Phuc was operating alongside the street, screaming and bare, having torn off her burning garments after a napalm strike by South Vietnamese forces. With one click on of a digicam, the picture, formally known as The Terror of War however extra extensively often called “Napalm Girl,” travelled across the globe through the Associated Press with gorgeous velocity and impression, altering the world’s perspective on the Vietnam War virtually in a single day.

It additionally cemented the profession of a younger Vietnamese-American photographer for the AP named Nick Ut, who would go on to win the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year award.

“I cried when I saw her running,” Mr. Ut would say years later, recalling how he helped Ms. Phuc right into a van on its option to the hospital. “If I don’t help her – if something happened and she died – I think I’d kill myself after that.”

Yet, in response to the claims made in a surprising new documentary known as The Stringer, the numerous lives modified by the “Napalm Girl” photograph may stem from a misattributed credit score.

Directed by Bao Nguyen, The Stringer, which is able to start streaming on Netflix on Nov. 28, follows the work of journalists Gary Knight, Fiona Turner, Terri Lichstein and Le Van as they observe down the origins of the {photograph} following a tip from Carl Robinson, a former AP photograph editor in Saigon.

In the movie, Mr. Robinson says that it was not Mr. Ut who took the photograph, however slightly a younger freelancer (or “stringer”) named Nguyen Thanh Nghe who was additionally on web site, alongside Mr. Ut and a handful of different journalists. The credit score change, in response to Mr. Robinson, was ordered by Horst Faas, a legend in photojournalism and the AP’s Saigon chief of images, who died in 2012.

When The Stringer made its world premiere on the Sundance Film Festival this previous January, the movie’s claims surprised audiences and rocked the photojournalism neighborhood. Mr. Nguyen, a seasoned doc filmmaker who has made movies on every thing from Bruce Lee to pop music, had the same response when he realized of the journalism collective’s investigation in early 2023.

“As a filmmaker, I get a lot of cold e-mails about documentary ideas and concepts, so I was a little hesitant when I got an e-mail from Terri Lichstein saying that they had this story they were exploring in Vietnam but wouldn’t say what the story was,” Mr. Nguyen stated in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “And then Terri told me this unbelievable story. Well, I joke that I’m glad it was a phone call and not a Zoom call, because my face was just flabbergasted when I heard it.”

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Mr. Nguyen’s movie traces the investigation over months and months because it progressively builds steam, with the journalists monitoring down the elusive Mr. Nghe and enlisting the providers of an exterior agency to forensically recreate that fateful day in South Vietnam utilizing every thing from archival pictures to satellite tv for pc pictures. Mr. Robinson can also be interviewed within the movie, expressing remorse that he had buried Mr. Nghe’s credit score for therefore many a long time.

“I had heard this rumour about the photo a long time ago. But I received the first e-mail from Carl in December, 2022. I told Fiona, my wife, that this would make a really great written story. But she said we might want to look at it being a film instead,” Mr. Knight stated in an interview alongside Mr. Nguyen. “We talked to Carl and thought, okay, he’s a credible witness, but there’s a lot of work to do to make this into a project.”

Ahead of the movie’s Sundance premiere, the AP issued a report, carried out over six months, which concluded that the group “has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.”

Five months later, in May, 2025, the AP launched a second report that concluded it was “possible Ut took this picture” however that its investigation raised “significant questions … that we may never be able to answer.” That identical month, the World Press Photo group introduced that it was suspending Mr. Ut’s attribution to the picture, after its personal report based mostly on “analysis of location, distance, and the camera used on that day.”

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Representatives for the AP didn’t reply to a request for remark from The Globe. Mr. Ut, whose lawyer James Hornstein has known as the movie “defamatory” and World Press Photo’s determination “deplorable and unprofessional,” didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Ms. Phuc, who was later granted political asylum in Canada and now could be based mostly in Ajax, Ont., has stated that she has “no memory of those minutes,” and, because the movie’s finish credit word, nonetheless believes that Mr. Ut took the photograph after which took her to the hospital.

After the movie’s Sundance screening, at which Mr. Nghe was within the viewers alongside Mr. Robinson, Mr. Nguyen has barely up to date the doc to incorporate developments within the investigations carried out by the AP and World Press Photo. But the filmmaking workforce has nonetheless not spoken with Mr. Ut.

“We’ve been very open to talking with Nick; he knows the door is open, we’ve made that very clear. We reached out to him throughout the process of making the film about 16 times, either directly or through mutual friends. But thus far, he has not wanted to talk to us,” Mr. Knight stated.

“It’s pretty quiet at the moment. There was a very concerted effort undertaken by prize-winning photographers to try and stop the film from being seen, but that didn’t work. And an intent to make sure the film wasn’t distributed, which didn’t work, either.”

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For the journalists behind the movie, the doc arrives at a pivotal second for photojournalism, when questions of authorship and authenticity are dominating the discourse.

“The ability of journalists to examine their own profession is really critical to ensure credibility in journalism, to maintain trust with the public. With a story like this, it might be an uncomfortable story for our profession to confront, but nevertheless we have to confront accusations like this head-on,” Mr. Knight stated. “If we’re going to hold everyone else in society to account, we have to do so ourselves. Mistakes happen, but it’s how you confront those mistakes that’s really critical.”

However, as debates over synthetic intelligence rage within the media, Mr. Nguyen is cautious to notice that the legitimacy of the “Napalm Girl” {photograph} itself has by no means been up for debate.

“I want to make it clear that the authenticity and the impact of the photo is not questioned at all in the film. It’s really about authorship.”