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Over the weekend, just blocks away from President Trump’s June 14 military parade in Washington, D.C., the third annual DC/Dox got underway. The four-day documentary film festival kicked off on June 12 and highlighted films that explore some of America’s most pressing issues, including school shootings, book banning that target race and Lgbtqia+ issues, attacks on free speech and the country’s growing income and wealth divide.

Director Anayansi Prado was at DC/Dox with “Uvalde Mom,” a feature doc about the 2022 mass school shooting that rocked the small town of Uvalde, Texas, and left 19 children and two teachers dead. Prado said that screening her film in D.C. during the military parade felt meaningful.

“There are so many films here that are addressing really important social justice and global issues, so I think it’s really significant and interesting that this festival is taking place on the day of the military parade,...

Conspiracies and cover-ups are a dime a dozen in fictional movies. But when a documentary unravels a conspiracy, it can take on the kind of hushed suspense those films used to have and rarely do anymore.

“The Stringer” is a documentary mystery about a deadly serious subject: the true authorship of the famous Vietnam War photograph, taken on June 8, 1972, in the town of Trảng Bàng, that showed the aftermath of a napalm attack — a 9-year-old girl named Phan Thį Kim Phúc running, naked, toward the camera, her arms outstretched like broken wings, her mouth open in a scream of agony. She’d been burned all over her body, and the photograph, from the moment it went out into the world and was viewed by billions, became known as “Napalm Girl.” It is one of the most iconic and devastating images of the horror of war ever seen.

“Naplam Girl” is...

It’s one of the most famous photographs ever taken. In it, a 9-year-old girl runs down a road in South Vietnam, naked, her skin burning from a napalm attack as she shrieks in agony. It’s a searing encapsulation of the tragic consequences of war, as well as a potent reminder that the victims of these conflicts are often the youngest and most vulnerable among us.

But “The Stringer,” a controversial documentary that debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, claims that Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking the shot outside the town of Trang Bang, wasn’t the photo’s author. Instead, the film alleges that Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelancer and a driver for NBC, actually captured the image, popularly known as “Napalm Girl,” and has been denied recognition for decades.

Before delivering this bombshell, director Bao Nguyen and...

The retired Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, who is credited with taking the famous “Napalm Girl” photo in 1972, tried to stop Sundance from screening a movie that asserts he isn’t the real photographer, filmmakers told THR on Sunday.

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s lawyers recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to the festival and filmmakers behind the new movie The Stringer, they said; the film world-premiered on Saturday anyway.

A festival representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment. A request for comment for Ut via an AP representative was not replied to by the photojournalist.

The news about the documentary is the latest turn in a quickly escalating battle that has turned Sundance into nothing less than a referendum on the credibility of modern media, with the Associated Press pushing back hard on the film’s claim that Ut didn’t take the photo and the filmmakers firing back in kind,...

How do you unravel a lie and, harder yet, the official story that’s been built up around it? This is the immense question propelling The Stringer, Bao Nguyen’s quiet bombshell of a documentary. At its center is a famous photograph that became a shot heard round the world during the Vietnam War, and the small team of journalists that set out, 50 years later, to determine if it was attributed to the wrong photographer.

A chronicle of globe-trotting gumshoe reporting that incorporates, briefly and effectively, state-of-the-art visual forensics, The Stringer builds upon an intense undercurrent of emotion. Nguyen has made a stirring film that is less about geopolitics than workplace politics — and ultimately about the knotty bond between the two.

Deeply embedded in the cultural history of both the United States and Vietnam, the photograph, officially titled “The Terror of War” and informally known as “Napalm Girl,” was taken...