One would think the contested ownership of a wartime photograph would hardly compel but experienced American filmmaker Bao Nguyen thought otherwise and the result is The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, a strangely riveting documentary. The crux of the film is that June 1972 photo itself, the harrowing shot of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a country street with skin blistering off due to a napalm attack. Using evidence painstakingly gathered over years and artfully presenting his case through interviews, Nguyen claims the iconic photo, which helped end the Vietnam War, was accredited to an Associated Press staffer (who ended up receiving a Pulitzer Prize and countless accolades), when it should have been accorded to a South Vietnamese “stringer,” a camera man for day-by-day hire. This assertion, tremendously controversial, is investigated and analyzed in tense scenes and the film quickly becomes a “Sampson versus Goliath” challenge. Witnesses are assembled in different countries, a firm analyzes in excruciating detail who was where down that dusty Vietnamese road, and questions of use and abuse of local wartime labor are pursued. It is a heady brew and The Stringer should fascinate anyone with any remote interest in recent history.
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