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The Stringer (Bao Nguyen, 2025)

As I was writing this report from Sundance 2025, the festival announced the winner of its Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition: Hailey Gates’s Atropia, a mordant satire set in one of those fake villages where the U.S. Army trains its soldiers for overseas missions. In the film, we’re still under the presidency of George W. Bush, and America is dropping bombs and putting boots on the ground daily in Iraq. In Atropia, a simulated war zone located in the hills of Southern California—not too far from Hollywood—a bunch of actors cosplay as Iraqi villagers for soldiers seeking a week of immersion before they’re shipped off to Baghdad. Their roles: terrorist, street-DVD seller, mustard-gas scientist, imam. Most of the actors are there to make some money; Alia Shawkat’s Fayruz is there to live out her dreams of Hollywood. (Think Arrested Development if it were directed by Peter Watkins.)

The actors’ performances require an extraordinary commitment—they’re saving lives by staying in character, they’re told—but it’s telling which details are fastidiously “authentic” and which aren’t. “Brown” is the only requirement for the actors; it doesn’t matter what kind of brown they are, whether Middle Eastern or Latinx. Actors playing wives must walk several paces behind their on-set husbands, but the burqas they wear are Afghan, not Iraqi. The uneasy alliance of war and the movie-making machinery is laid bare: flattened depictions of real people and places pave the way for dehumanizing violence. I found the film both very funny and a bit frivolous, as its well-observed ironies eventually dissolve into a kooky love story—between Fayruz and a handsome soldier playing a terrorist in the village but bristling to return to his duties in Iraq—that trades satire for simple absurdity. But the appeal of this tongue-in-cheek look at the pageantry of war is easy to understand, particularly as the U.S. negotiates its role in yet another bloody conflict abroad.

Images already afford us a veneer of distance from violence as it unfolds; images about those images offer us a safe enough vantage point to engage yet walk away unscathed. Perhaps that’s why so many films at this year’s festival were about the making of images, particularly of real-life suffering and violence. The Stringer takes us back to the Vietnam War: a time when the media did seem to matter—when photographic accounts of on-the-ground atrocities became crucial correctives to Western propaganda and helped fuel the anti-war movement. No photo has become as much an exemplar of this power as the famous “Terror of War” image—colloquially named “Napalm Girl”—from June 1972. Taken in Trảng Bàng, it shows a naked 9-year-old girl—Phan Thị Kim Phúc—burned by napalm bombs and running toward the camera alongside several other children, all of them screaming in pain; they were victims of an attack by South Vietnamese forces, who mistook them for “enemy targets.”

Like the infamous Civil War–era photograph of Peter, the enslaved man with a scourged back, the “Napalm Girl” image has become somewhat horrifyingly iconic—so familiar that it no longer shocks us. The picture was published in The New York Times and credited to the Vietnamese-American Associated Press staff photographer Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer Prize and many other accolades for it. In 2010, an AP photo editor who was in the room when the photo was chosen for print claimed that it was actually taken by a South Vietnamese military photographer, Nguyen Thành Nghe, who was working as a freelancer—a stringer, in journo-speak—and that the AP’s photo chief falsely credited it to Ut. This mystery drives The Stringer, a sort of true-crime doc that follows British photojournalist Gary Knight on his quest to deduce the photo’s true authorship. Early in the film, Knight sets up the stakes of the movie: challenging the widely accepted and celebrated legend of Nick Ut’s shot would “rewrite history,” he says, and perhaps reveal a “larger conspiracy in photojournalism.”

The “conspiracy” he’s referring to is something of an open secret: stringers, fixers, translators, and other useful locals are routinely used by Western reporters in war zones and compensated poorly, whether in terms of money or credit. Yet the film’s almost tunnel-visioned focus on the authorship of the photo, and why and how it was obscured, doesn’t make room for all the ways in which one might consider who “owns the rights” to such an image. A scene in which Knight and a local Vietnamese journalist, Lê Vân, interview some of the people who were captured as children in those photos, questioning them about who they saw around them on that fateful day, leaves a bad taste in the mouth; they are emissaries of empire returning to the scene of their own predecessors’ crimes to wring even more (likely “award-winning”) content out of it. “It’s in the past, let it go,” one of the interviewees says gently.

In another scene, Knight and his team hire a French forensics company to perform a 3D analysis using different photos of the napalm attack. They bring the scene to rudimentary life as if using a Play-Doh set, the burnt children featureless and smooth like rubber figures, as the analysts calculate how far the various photographers in the vicinity would have been from Kim Phúc and what lenses they were using. The lives, deaths, and torments captured by the “Napalm Girl” photo become mere data points in a mission to “rewrite history”—even though the truth of who took the photo changes little about the Vietnam War or the lives of napalm victims, or about an industry that turns images of suffering into objects of consumption.

At a time when documentarians are increasingly hiring “impact producers” to strategize how to use the films to achieve so-called social change, an inflated sense of righteousness about movie-making feels cynical, like a ploy for funding and marketing. In Predators, one of the nonfiction standouts at this year’s Sundance, director David Osit questions what happens when media-makers eyeing profits and eyeballs conflate their work with public service. The movie examines the cultural phenomenon that was To Catch a Predator, the Chris Hansen–led show that aired on NBC’s Dateline program between 2004 and 2007, producing 20 episodes in that time. The show’s dubious methods—chatting with adult men online using decoys pretending to be underage, luring them into houses, confronting them on camera, and turning them over to the police—seemed inconsequential, even admirable, at the time, in light of the good it was purportedly doing to society by exposing the most dangerous of criminals.

What happens, however, when a quest for justice mixes with a profit-making drive and a mandate to thrill viewers? Through archival clips and raw footage that offer more context to the show’s production, and interviews with the people behind the program and its subsequent copycats, Osit tries to pin down whom this type of lurid and punitive spectacle serves: survivors, society, or the makers of the show. Two disturbing episodes—one from the original To Catch a Predator in which a target committed suicide, and another from the show’s online sequel, Takedown with Chris Hansen, in which an 18-year-old was busted for meeting up with a (supposed) 15-year-old—demonstrate the lengths to which the showrunners are willing to go for some good TV, emboldened by the belief that what they’re doing is, in fact, important.

But it’s the show’s more “successful” episodes—where the subjects say and do inarguably bad things and are caught—that provoke the deepest reflections in Predators, a deliberative film that never rushes to answer its own questions. Osit eventually reveals that he, too, was a victim of child abuse, and was drawn to To Catch a Predator out of a desire for explanations, which he never found. He asks Hansen in a sit-down interview toward the end of the film if his catchphrase to the men on the show—“Help me understand”—was delivered in good faith. “I also make documentaries,” Osit tells Hansen, “so I’m not coming at you.” Osit continues: “We make TV, we point cameras at something, and the trauma continues.” In the face of Hansen’s unwavering faith in the righteousness of his work, Osit’s soul-searching ambivalence invigorates Predators. He isn’t trying to change the world with his movie—he’s trying to make sense of it.

Another Sundance nonfiction highlight, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, questions the significance we vest in spectacle as something revelatory—even protective. Gandbhir sutures together the events leading to a fatal shooting in a Florida neighborhood almost entirely using footage from police body cameras, obtained using FOIA requests. In its opening minutes, a cop is heard on voiceover interrogating a child, and offering a simple explanation for what it means to tell the truth: “If a child scribbles in red crayon all over a wall, and then walks out and says she didn’t do it, that’s not the truth.” As the film unfolds, the reductiveness of that example becomes increasingly clear: justice is often less a matter of whether something happened than of why. 

Laws requiring cops to wear bodycams emerged in the wake of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands of the police in 2014. These devices represent a belief that surveillance entails safety, and that visual evidence can help resolve disputes, particularly over whether or not the use of force was warranted. At first glance, The Perfect Neighbor might seem like a portrait of effective policing. Over the course of many months, Susan Lorincz, a white woman in her late 50s, repeatedly calls the cops to complain about nuisances caused by her (mostly Black) neighbors and their children—they’re trespassing on her lawn, she claims, or making too much noise. In the grainy, fish-eye images captured by the bodycams, we see the police show up, talk to Lorincz calmly to try and deescalate the situation, then go over to her neighbors to assure them that they “get it”: she’s a psycho, and it’s best if the children try to stay out of her way.

But they are not there when a woman is eventually murdered: Ajike Owens bangs on Susan Lorincz’s door to confront the woman about harassing her children, and Lorincz shoots the mother of four through a closed door door with a handgun. There’s no footage of that moment. Lorincz is arrested and, after a long-drawn-out process in which Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws are considered, charged with manslaughter and sentenced to prison time. The justice system produces the best outcome it can, and yet it could not stop the killing of a Black woman at the hands of a racist and mentally unwell white woman. The Perfect Neighbor portrays a society where racism and economic inequity are allowed to proliferate, where all manner of social problems and conflicts are relegated to cops in lieu of a strong social safety net, where all we can do is witness a world on fire—and say to each other, “Yes, that happened.”