Regret to Inform

A unique documentary film on the Vietnam War and wars in general. Its' focus is on the widows' of war. These are widows' who will always experience the trauma of war. This documentary was made 25 years after the end of the war. Part of it's' focus is on one woman's return to the site her husband had died during the war.

The great strength of this film is it also speaks with Vietnamese women whose husbands were killed. Because their country experienced the war directly their stories are very different and more intense.

Like other great films on war this clearly points out that one's pain of war never goes away. The war lives on in one's life forever. One woman recounted that she felt her husband's name should have been at the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC. He committed suicide seven years after the end of the war and the reasons' were directly connected to Vietnam. Another woman's husband died from the effects of Agent Orange. In a recent commentary Canadian Romeo Dallaire, who has experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, said that the number of suicides of Vietnam War veterans was far higher than the general population. He said these suicides would raise significantly the count of American war dead from Vietnam.

This film deeply moved me. I've seen other documentaries about the War, and forgotten them the next morning. I'm still thinking about this one.

The juxtaposition of beautiful scenery and truly horrible war stories is very affecting. Everyone in the theater was completely silent throughout the entire film, and EVERYONE stayed for the credits.

I think that the women in the movie have a certain emotional honesty that makes the movie much more powerful. It's important to understand the impact that the war had on families and children. Most documentaries focus on the lives of the American soldiers. The music is also very appropriate... It's hopeless trying to review this as a film, I just urge you to watch it.

We ran this film at the "Normal" theater, for the Illinois Wesleyan May term series. The director, Barbara Sonneborn, introduced the film, and was on hand after for questions.

Our audience was mixed with college students and adults. I am sure the students saw it has history, but the adults had lived this as history. I was one of the adults. Not until this film, did I see the Vietnam war, as more than just a page of history that I missed.

During the showing, all you could hear besides the film, was the muffled sound of the projector. After the film, there were 200 plus people on their feet to applaud Barbara.

As a Vietnamese who was born more than 10 years after the Vietnam War, I learned about the War at school, through my parents, through my grandparents; I watched the War on TV, I listened about the War on radio, and I celebrated our victory of the War with my people every April. But then, I rarely think about the War; The War isn't something very real to me, it is history. Watching Regret to Inform, I was saying to myself "Oh! The War was actually happen, it was real". The number of deaths is not just raw statistics in my history book, the film make me realized behind the numbers are husbands who had wives and children waited for them. I'm very fortune that both my grandfathers, my uncle, my host dad Mike are not in the statistic. After watching Regret to inform, a moving documentary film with heartbroken testimonies of American and Vietnamese widows of the War, I recognized how careless I'm; I was born only 11 years after the War.

This is a heartbreaking Oscar-nominated film, 7 years in the making, that brings a war I've only known as history, being 20, to vivid, poignant, and brutally honest life. Sonnenborn brings the Vietnam war home from a bold new perspective- the war's widows, both American and Vietnamese. Sonnenborn herself is such a widow, and so the film's journey to the past begins with her own personal trek to Vietnam, searching for the ordinary field where her husband Jeff was killed. As much as the film depicts the spiritual suffering of American soldiers and their families, it reveals the Vietnamese in the same suffering, a decent people forced to do the unimaginable to survive in war.

Sonnenborn brilliantly combines peaceful images of the modern Vietnam with brutal up-front news footage from the war. The soundtrack is a mix of atmospheric music, the testimony of Vietnamese survivors describing their ordeal, and American widows reciting their husbands' words, through letters sent home during the war.

I don't know why it is we constantly separate the documentary genre- this is a drama, a social and political film, and just because it has no major actors and relies totally on reality should not disqualify it from showing in your local multiplex. It is a powerful, memorable picture, not just "another documentary." It makes you think and reflect about why we went into war, and it provokes many of the emotions for which we all seek film. "Regret to Inform" piercingly reveals how the souls, the humanity, of soldiers and civilians die in war. Seek this film out, whether you lived through Vietnam or not. It will affect you.