Regret to Inform
by Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, Lucy Massie Phenix, Ken Schneider
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DVD details
Director: Ken Schneider, Lucy Massie Phenix, Xuan Ngoc NguyenBrand: New Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 72 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-05-02
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Docurama
Product features:
- On January 1, 1968, Barbara Sonneborn s husband, Jeff Gurvitz, left to fight in Vietnam. Eight weeks later, on February 29, 1968, he crawled out of a foxhole during a mortar attack to rescue his radio operator and was killed. Sonneborn learned of her husband s death on her 24th birthday. We regret to inform you.read the official notice. Twenty years after Jeff s death, Sonneborn went back to Viet
DVD Reviews of Regret to Inform
DVD Review: Slanted perspectives gained through emotional manipulation
Summary: 2 Stars
As a longtime but wary viewer of Vietnam War flicks, I've learned that to be moved by a piece of work is not necessarily the same as to be illuminated by it. This is true of the documentary "Regret to Inform," about Vietnam War widows, by Barbara Sonneborn.
While I was moved to tears by parts of the film, I found little that jibed with my own Vietnamese memory: that of a country deeply divided by a civil war, where North and South were at each other's throats long before the Americans arrived. My eldest uncle joined Ho Chi Minh's army in the North while his two brothers joined the South, later becoming pilots who dropped B-52 bombs on him and his troops. It is a memory of Vietnamese killing Vietnamese in a bloody and senseless theater where Americans were mere side actors.
That America plays the central role in Sonneborn's documentary is no surprise. After all, Vietnam was a complicated, three-sided war, a difficult narrative that often gets reduced to two sides - America vs. all Vietnamese.
From that perspective, we see Americans as perpetrators of violence and Vietnamese as innocents in conical hats, waiting to be murdered. We are told this not so much in words but in the footage of American planes dropping bombs and napalm onto the tropical landscape. We are shown Vietnamese being herded and tied up like oxen by GIs or beaten by the butts of M-16s.
Not once do we see a Vietnamese holding a gun. Not once do we see a Vietnamese in army uniform. Only Americans have that privilege, as GIs, as wielders of history.
Vietnamese, so the images suggest, were passive victims of their fate - which does not explain America's defeat.
What I want to tell Sonneborn and all American filmmakers is this: Vietnam is not 14 years old. Vietnam's story does not begin when the first American helicopter landed in the rice fields, and it does not end when the last helicopter left the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon. In the 20th century alone, Vietnamese fought, besides their countrymen, the French, the Japanese and the Chinese, and then went on to occupy Cambodia for 10 years. They never lost a war - not counting South Vietnam's defeat.
"What is the legacy of war?" Sonneborn asks in her film, "and what happens after the troops go home?"
What happened is that Hanoi - America's victim-turned-victor - immediately enforced a vindictive policy in the defeated South, putting nearly a million men in "re-education" camps and forcing hundreds of thousands of families to survive in malaria-infested New Economic Zones while confiscating their properties. More than 2 million Vietnamese risked death at sea as boat people to escape.
Where, I wonder, are the voices of the widows whose husbands starved to death in re-education camps? Where are the voices of those who ended up in refugee camps waiting to be accepted by the West?
Why, I wonder, is it easier for filmmakers to fly thousands of miles across the ocean to Hanoi to interview communist officials and film scenes of exotic limestone mountains or sparkling rivers than it is to drive a few miles to San Jose or Los Angeles or Dallas to interview the million or so Vietnamese-Americans? Is it because their epic story might somehow dislodge Americans' own narcissistic sense of guilt?
If that is the case, the answer to Sonneborn's question regarding the legacy of war is this: War and its aftermath are always bad, but it is worse when its history is simplified and its many voices muffled. The result of such misinformation is always ignorance.
Description of Regret to Inform
On January 1, 1968, Barbara Sonneborn?s husband, Jeff Gurvitz, left to fight in Vietnam. Eight weeks later, on February 29, 1968, he crawled out of a foxhole during a mortar attack to rescue his radio operator and was killed. Sonneborn learned of her huThis beautiful, shattering documentary by photographer Barbara Sonneborn began production in 1992 but was spiritually born in 1968 with the death of her husband and high school sweetheart, Jeff Gurvitz. Eight weeks into his tour of duty in Vietnam, Gurvitz was killed during a mortar attack at Khe Sanh while attempting to rescue a comrade. A tape-recorded letter he had just sent to his wife appeared in Sonneborn's mailbox some time after his awful sacrifice. Sonnenborn put it away and did not listen to it until her decision to make this film, which concerns the losses and agonies endured by women on both sides of America's disastrous military campaign in Southeast Asia. Mixing archival combat footage and striking new cinematography highlighting Vietnam's green splendor, Sonneborn bridges the past and present. She visits the scene of her husband's death and interviews a number of Vietnamese women nearly broken by grief over horrendous family loss and personal suffering: forced prostitution, torture, the abandonment of wounded loved ones. Back in the U.S., Sonneborn turns to other widows of American soldiers lost in the war and hears their stories, as well as those of other women who reveal the prolonged, terminal misery of men exposed to Agent Orange. The film's anguish is palpable yet effectively subdued, the better to let its delicate workings evoke a deep reaction from its viewers. --Tom Keogh
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