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A new documentary raises questions about who really took the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photo of a naked girl and other children screaming and running as they fled a napalm bombing during the Vietnam War.
The credit for the image, titled The Terror of War and known colloquially as the “Napalm Girl” photo, has always gone to the Associated Press staff photographer Nick Ut. The Stringer, out on Netflix Nov. 28, presents another argument. In the documentary, journalists and investigators say that based on news reel footage of the road in Trảng Bàng, where the photo was taken on June 8, 1972, a stringer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ took the iconic photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, not Ut.
“Nick Ut came with me on that assignment but he didn’t take that photo,” Nghệ says in the doc.
The AP is standing by its credit, and Ut did not participate in the documentary. In a statement shared with TIME by his lawyer James Hornstein, Ut said he’s “deeply disappointed that Netflix has chosen to give international distribution to a film whose claims remain unsubstantiated and contested by eyewitnesses and by the historical record.” Hornstein argues “no new documentary evidence — no negative, no contact sheet, no print, no contemporaneous note, and no photographic archive — has surfaced to support an alternative authorship…If credible evidence existed to challenge Nick Út’s authorship, it would not have remained confined to a handful of individuals whose accounts emerge five decades after the fact and contradict the overwhelming body of contemporaneous testimony.”
Yet buzz about the movie hasn’t died down. Here’s how the documentary presents the theory that Ut didn’t take the photo and the reaction it’s gotten so far.
The whistleblower
In Dec. 2022, Carl Robinson,…
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