July 22–29, 1999

movie shorts

Regret to Inform

recommended

Every time a new film about the Vietnam War appears, it seems as if we’d heard the last, as if every aspect that could have been dealt with has been covered. And then a movie like Regret to Inform comes along, and makes us see everything anew. Directed by Barbara Sonneborn, whose husband was killed in action in 1968, the profoundly moving documentary traces the legacy of grief on both sides of the war. In addition to interviewing American war widows like herself, Sonneborn has taken the extraordinary step of including interviews with Vietnamese women who lost family in the war. In so doing, the film makes a calculated anti-war statement, one that resonates far beyond the boundaries of any one conflict. Framed by Sonneborn’s journey to Khe Sanh, the place where her husband was killed, Regret moves slowly and with grace through the stories of women whose lives were shattered by the violence of war; one Vietnamese woman recalls how she lost nine family members "before breakfast." And in a heartbreaking audiotape excerpt Sonneborn took 20 years to play, her husband relates how the war warped his soul as well. For a first-time filmmaker, Sonneborn has an astonishing grasp of how to shape material to convey meaning without propagandizing; most of the film’s statements are made by others, not her narration. You may not feel the material accumulating until you leave the theater, but when it hits, it makes an impact like few films ever do. (See Cindy Fuchs’ interview with Barbara Sonneborn.)

—Sam Adams