(L–R) Nguyen Thành Nghe and Carl Robinson attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “The Stringer” at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Lucy Spicer
In 2020, Bao Nguyen brought Be Water to the Sundance Film Festival, then returned with The Greatest Night in Pop in 2024. But even as Nguyen spoke to his 2024 Festival premiere audience about archival footage of musicians recording “We Are the World,” he was already sitting on another project, one that had to be kept under wraps until the time was right. Because this new documentary could change the history of photojournalism as we know it.
A two-year investigation has culminated in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of The Stringer at The Ray Theatre on January 25. “It’s such a profound honor to bring The Stringer to Sundance, a festival that really understands what it means to take on challenging and inspiring stories,” says Nguyen before the screening. “This film invites you all to think about uncomfortable truths, but also some very aspirational stories, and I’m deeply honored to be the director on this project.”
The uncomfortable truths begin with an email that journalist and photographer Gary Knight received in December 2022 from a man named Carl Robinson. The email contained a bombshell: Robinson, who was a photo editor for the Associated Press’ Saigon office during the Vietnam War, wanted to clear his conscience of something that had been weighing on him for 50 years — that the iconic, world-changing photo known by many as “Napalm Girl” was credited to the wrong photographer. Robinson claims he was told to give the credit to Nick Út, a 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who worked for AP and had been on the scene at the time, but that the photo’s true author was a freelance photographer, or stringer.
“Like any investigation, it starts with a question, and in this case, from one source. And that’s one man’s word against another,” says Knight at the post-premiere Q&A. “Then you start, as you saw in the film, this enormous process of finding other eyewitnesses, trying to contact everybody still alive, looking through every newspaper story, every article that’s ever been written, and then engaging with forensics. It’s an enormous job,” he explains. “The challenge is it’s a trail that is now 53 years old, and so it’s very, very difficult to read the map.”
But read the map they did, and it led the team to Nguyen Thành Nghe, a freelance photographer who was driving for a news crew that day at Trảng Bàng in 1972 when a napalm attack forced soldiers and civilians — including 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who was photographed after tearing off her burning clothes — to flee. Finding Nghe opens the door for further sensitive discussions about undervalued freelance workers, newsroom integrity, and the fraught relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam.
As shocking and impressive as the investigation itself is, the heart of The Stringer lies in Nguyen’s passion for amplifying Nghe’s story and the community he represents: “… a generation of Vietnamese people, the diaspora of people who’ve been marginalized, who felt like they couldn’t tell their truth because they had to take care of their family,” explains Nguyen during the Q&A. “They had weights of daily life that they had to carry, and so if in any way this film could uplift those stories, then that was what I was hoping to do.
“At the end of the day, for me, I was presenting the story of this investigation of the narrative of Nghe, of all these people, and Carl, too. For me, it’s an emotional journey.” Emotions are certainly running high in the film’s Q&A, both for Nguyen and for Nghe, who sits stoically with a translator at his side. When asked what he thinks about the film, Nghe responds graciously.
“I just want to say, first of all, hello, everyone. And I’m very, very happy to be here. And thank you so much for coming to see the film,” expresses Nghe with the help of his translator. Nghe is older and slower now, but what he says next shows a strength of character that has always lived within him, a strength that deserves to be recognized.
“I took the photo.”
