Regret to Inform
by Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, Lucy Massie Phenix, Ken Schneider
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DVD Cover Information
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
Movie Reviews of Regret to Inform
Movie Review: One of the Best Vietnam War Documentaries I've Seen
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a university lecturer and have taught classes focusing on the Vietnam War. I'm also the sister of a Vietnam Vet who died of Agent Orange poisoning. REGRET TO INFORM is one of the best documentaries to be done about that historic period. I've used this documentary in my college classes, and it has brought many students to tears. It has also affected the soldiers in my classes profoundly. This semester, a young man who just finished his training in the Airforce, said he has been forever changed by the images in this movie and that he understands for the first time what effect war has on civilians. I believe that in looking at Sonneborn's film, we ALL have to take into account what her purpose was. I don't find this documentary to be one-sided because Sonneborn achieves what she sets out to do: to connect with other wives and allow them to talk about their pain, hoping to assuage her own pain in the process. She does look at the losses from both sides.
Indeed, in her film, war itself is the atrocity. Of course more attention is going to be paid to the consequences of "The American War" for the Vietnamese: the war was in their country. Many of them experienced total devastation and wrecked lives, whole families slaughtered. In one heart-wrenching moment, for instance, a Vietnamese woman shares that nearly her entire family was killed before they had a chance to eat breakfast. She weeps for them, even to this day.
The gift of this movie is that it shows the extent to which these women have reconciled their lives with the pain of war, and it shows the power of forgiveness. At one point, Sonneborn encounters the people who may very well have been responsible for the death of her husband, yet she treats them with dignity and respect, participates in a solemn ceremony with them for all that has been lost. Moreover, Sonneborn HAS to focus on the brutality of American troops because her own husband acknowledged it and tried to make humanistic choices in the face of all the confusion that was Vietnam. The other American women in this film have to face up to the fact that their husbands might have committed brutal acts.
One of the reasons this acknowledgment of American brutality is so important is that young people today don't understand that Americans are capable of it: they think we're more moral than others. To illustrate: one of my students thought the Vietnamese had invented and sprayed Agent Orange!
Until Americans face the fact that we are no better nor any worse than any other human being, we will be victims of our own hypocrisy and fail to grow as individuals and as a nation.
Summary 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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