Regret to Inform . Austin Chronicle . 03-29-99

Regret to Inform

DIRECTED BY: Barbara Sonneborn

REVIEWED: 03-29-99

Filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn takes a unique and personal tack in this examination of the Vietnam conflict and the national scars that still fester. While still in her 20s, she received that dreaded knock on the door with the grim news that her husband, a U.S. serviceman stationed in Que Sanh, was dead. Twenty-five years after her life was shattered by an armed conflict never even fully recognized as an official American war, Sonneborn travels to the killing fields with a film crew (including Emiko Omori, director of fest entry Rabbit in the Moon, and Nancy Scheisari, director of fest entry Loaves and Fishes) and retraces her husband's final days. What she finds is a beautiful land still throbbing with unresolved issues of war, terror, and hopelessness. Including archival footage and copious interview footage with war widows on both sides of the conflict, Sonneborn crafts a scathing antiwar diatribe that is as shocking as it is visually engrossing. Alongside the tearful widows, she paints a picture of Vietnam as a hallowed battleground, the victim of 500 years of war and occupation, a place of lush jungles and amazingly green vegetation fed by rivers of blood and suffering. Wrenching in an intensely personal way, this is documentary filmmaking at its spellbinding best.

--Marc Savlov

Full Length Reviews
Regret to Inform

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