1 hr 40 mins, Sheffield DocFest

⭐⭐⭐

Documentary covers incredible and worthy story but has the wrong focus.

It’s Nosebleeds on the road this week as I’ve been in Sheffield for its annual DocFest (which shouldn’t need much explanation beyond its title!). I was so eager to see this first documentary on my list that I braved a 6.15am train from London for its showing on Friday. Bao Nguyen’s The Stringer presents an incredible alternative history for one of the world’s most iconic photographs. I was lucky enough to hear from Nguyen himself as he offered an introduction at Friday’s screening and joined a Q&A alongside some of the featured journalists.

1972’s The Terror of War (commonly known as Napalm Girl) is one of history’s most renowned pieces of photojournalism. Attributed to Associated Press staffer Nick Ut, it earned one of the four Pulitzers bagged by AP photojournalists during the Vietnam War. Depicting the nine-year-old Pahn Ti Kim Phuc burnt and naked, fleeing a napalm attack, its shocking depiction of the true human cost of the conflict is credited as a major influence on Western anti-war sentiment. Given Napalm Girl’s historical significance, the claim put forward by this film is truly shocking: that Ut never took the picture, and it was instead taken by a previously unknown freelance photographer (or ‘stringer’) called Nguyen Thanh Nghe. The Stringer follows a journalistic investigation conducted by Gary Knight, Terri Lichstein, Le Van and Fiona Turner, triggered by an email to Knight from one of the AP’s then-photo editors, Carl Robinson. Robinson claims it was he who miscredited the photo to Ut on the orders of his boss, AP picture editor Horst Faas. Nguyen’s film uses that allegation as a setting off point to chart the journalists’ attempts to find the stringer and learn more about what really happened that day in Trang Bang.

There’s no doubting the incredible journalistic feat achieved by Knight, Lichstein, Van and Turner in exposing this decades-long injustice and bringing the truth to light. (That is, if you believe their version of events, and the documentary certainly puts forward a strong case.) They have conducted some excellent research and pursued a story no-one else has bothered to investigate. That story – the deliberate misattribution of the image, why it occurred, and why it was hidden for so long – is unbelievable and fascinating, and well worthy of a film. Unfortunately, in The Stringer it suffers from being couched within another narrative that I think is far less interesting, that being the progress of the journalists’ investigation. While I am not for a second querying the journalistic integrity of the reporters or their hard work, their efforts just aren’t the most interesting part of this story to tell. There’s no bombshell moment, just the nitty-gritty of journalism (securing eyewitness interviews, reviewing old testimony), which as a viewer feels like an irritating distraction from the people and events they’re supposed to be documenting.

There’s also something slightly discomfiting about the way the journalists’ experience is constantly foregrounded throughout the film, particularly that of Gary Knight, who features most prominently. The Stringer starts by profiling Knight, includes his presence in all of the subject interviews and even incorporates his personal reflections on the information he finds. Of course, so-called ‘author documentaries’ have their place – the unique personalities of say, Michael Moore or Louis Theroux are inseparable from their filmmaking styles. But given the topic of this documentary is ostensibly righting the historic wrong of Nghe’s exclusion from the spotlight, it seems ironic that Knight takes up so much airtime. Adding to my sense of unease was the fact that it’s very clear the film was commissioned by the journalists themselves. It lends a certain artifice to scenes where Knight, Lichstein and Turner ponder the evidence gathered – comparing timelines or scrutinising photos. It’s not that those scenarios are particularly unlikely; surely they would be part and parcel of that kind of investigation. But the presence of their own camera crew creates an inevitable Hawthorne effect and the scenes come across as confected. Added together with the copious screentime and personal commentary afforded to Knight, it leaves a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth and a sense that maybe these reporters shouldn’t be inserting themselves quite so much into this narrative.

I was intrigued that in Nguyen’s introduction he spoke passionately about the need for the Vietnamese to be able to tell their own stories of the war, reflecting on his own cultural background as a child of Vietnamese refugees. It was a theme picked up on by the journalists in the Q&A. There’s no questioning the validity of that idea and far be it from me to criticise Nguyen for how he wants to tell the stories of his own community. But these comments made it all the more jarring to me that the journalists’ investigation is used as the lens through which we learn about Ut, Nghe and this historic injustice.

Structuring choices aside, there’s certainly plenty of fascinating documentary content in The Stringer. There are some insightful interviews with other photojournalists on the ground; one of the film’s most effective sequences is when it uses this testimony to offer a window into the bizarre, insulated life of a Western reporter during war. There’s also some really fantastic 3D modelling that pieces together other footage and stills from Trang Bang, providing the documentary’s most compelling evidence in favour of Nghe’s authorship (a real smoking gun). In a way, the flawed choice to structure the film around the investigation can’t really be laid at Nguyen’s feet – after all, that was what he was commissioned to do. But overall one is left with the impression that even though The Stringer is an extraordinarily worthy journalistic effort, the focus just isn’t quite on the right elements of the story.