Over the weekend, news from the Sundance Film Festival took the photojournalism world by storm. The VII Foundation’s new documentary film, The Stringer, premiered at the Festival on 25 January. The film questions who is the author of the iconic photograph “Napalm Girl” taken in 1972 during the Vietnam war. Until now, the photograph was credited to Nick Ut for the Associated Press who won the Pulitzer Prize for it, the film suggest that the shot belongs instead to a stringer who was working for the NBC, Nguyen Thanh Nghe.
Gary Knight, The VII Foundation’s Executive Director and one of the film’s team, said:
Over the past two years, I have been working with a team of journalists at The VII Foundation and in Vietnam on an investigation into the veracity of the authorship of one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, or indeed, of any century. That investigation was documented by the Vietnamese American film director Bao Nguyen.
What we uncovered speaks to the heart of what is most important in our profession. The film grapples with questions of authorship, racial injustice, and journalistic ethics while shining a light on the fundamental yet often unrecognized contributions of local freelancers who provide the information we need to understand how events worldwide impact us all.
This is a story that many people in our profession did not want told, and some of them continue to go to great lengths to make sure it isn’t told. But regardless of the passage of time and however inconvenient it might be, nothing should stall the pursuit of truth in journalism because we are obliged to hold ourselves to account if we seek to hold everyone else to account. There is an old adage that journalism is ‘the first draft of history’, sometimes it takes a second draft to set the record straight.
As one of the legendary Vietnamese journalists we spoke to told us: “There’s nothing more important than the truth. When the truth is disregarded, that’s when society becomes corrupted. (The truth) cannot be twisted, or torn apart, because if so, it’s no longer the truth and we will have lost our moral compass.”
Having a documentary film selected for Sundance is a great honor and involves a complex process. Part of this process was discussed on the Doc Talk podcast (21 January 2025), where the host asked the Sundance senior programmer Basil Tsiokos and programmer Sudeep Sharma how the festival navigates issues of authenticity and accepts films that challenge the conventional wisdom on particular topics. Sudeep Sharma offered the first answer (starting at 30:12):¹
…the film, The Stringer is directed by Bao Nguyen. He’s been at the festival. He was just at the festival last year…with The Greatest Night in Pop, which was a totally different film, totally different, but it was also that same. I mean, I think with the similarities with that, and he also directed Be Water, which played at the festival about three or four years ago. But I think what’s the similarity is Bao is a very rigorous and detailed filmmaker. And, you know, there is, I’d say about The Stringer in general, but also about his work too. It’s like there is a, and I think any good documentary is trying to find the truth, you know, and like trying to represent the truth. And obviously truth is multifaceted. No one owns it. No one can, you know, just say definitively this is what it is. But I think that what he [Bao Nguyen] does in his work and what he does in this film is showing you different elements that are leading him to, leading him and you as an audience member to make conclusions based on what he’s showing it, right? And I think that in this film, it is very compelling what he presents and what he says about, and not just him, but other people that he’s following that is showing their own research and the results of their investigations that are very, you know, they are founded, and it seems like, in fact, and that people are not just coming to saying what they’re saying just randomly.
Basil Tsiokos then elaborated (at 33:22):
You know, there are some there are some documentaries out there that are not purporting to break news or not purport to tell us the truth. They are just telling a story about someone or whatnot. Those are maybe viewed in a different way by us than the films that are really actually making some kind of an accusation or assertion about something. So, we treat those that do require some fact-checking with more sensitive eyes, right? We look at their sources. We look at what the film itself is saying. We see, we ask questions of, you know, their methodology and, you know, how are they coming to these conclusions? Is it based in fact? Is it based in speculation And so, we try to do within the nature, within the abilities that we have as programmers. We are not journalists. We are not, you know, we are not broadcasters. We don’t have the same standards that are in play for some of these other professionals that have to work in, you know, to different letters of the law. But at the same time, we don’t want to put something out there that we can’t stand behind. And in this case, we were compelled by what is presented in the film, because the film is not just, hey, this is the thing. It shows us how they come to the conclusion that this is the thing that they are saying. They’re showing the investigation in detail. Like, it is exhaustive in a good way, in terms of showing you how they came to the conclusions they did around whatever it is they’re saying that is in this film. And for that, we found it compelling. And so we have to go along those lines to err on the side of, we believe that this filmmaker has done all of the things that he or she has to have done in order to make the conclusions, to present the conclusions they had in this film. We don’t treat it very lightly. We know that this has impact. We know that this can, this is saying something about organizations, about individuals, and we want to be able to, we want to be able to stand behind it as an organization, and we want to trust that the filmmaker we’re putting on stage can stand behind the assertions that the film is making as well.
For further information on our investigation and the film itself, please go to The Stringer on The VII Foundation website, where you will also find a list of press coverage and reviews of the film. Once the film is distributed publicly, we will also have information on how you can see it.
