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Customer Reviews of Regret to Inform

powerful and painful
I had been looking for a copy of Regret to Inform for several years now. I finally had a chance to watch the documentary and I was blown away. This is a very painful documentary to watch. It deals with the widows of the Vietnam War and how they dealt with the experience of losing their husbands and also about the years after. Surprisingly, this documentary also features Vietnamese women who lost their husbands in the war (the Vietnamese call it the American War).

I have read many soldiers accounts of the war (Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Robert Mason, etc) and I have read histories of what happened and why on the political side of the conflict. What I have very little experience with is the homefront, the families of the soldiers. Regret to Inform does not address any political ramifications of the war or the reasons for it. Regret to Inform has everything to do with the women. It is a painful story to watch unfold.

The American widows have had to deal with their men going to a foreign country and to kill people who did nothing to them. One Native American woman recalls how her husband saw how similar he looked to the Vietnamese and how incomprehensible it was that he would be called to kill these men. Another woman tells of her husband who came home, but was already dead. He held on for years, but suffered the affects of Agent Orange. For him, going home from Vietnam was only the beginning of the war.

The Vietnamese widows have a similar, but somewhat different story to tell. While they deal with the same grief from the loss of their husbands, they also had to deal with the fact that the war was on their lands, in their homes. They say American soldiers walking through their villages, killing their children. This is the story that they are telling, of the horror of being in the war, but not fighting it. Their homes were bombed as they try to feed their families. They have both physical and emotional suffering and it is difficult to comprehend the nature of their suffering.

This is a powerful and painful film. Because of the very nature of the subject, this is an anti-war film. It was nominated for an Academy Award. This is an excellent film.

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Some woud rather forget, but his film remembers...
Nominated for an Oscar in 1999 and winner of best documentary and best cinematography at Sundance, this little film is tremendously intense. Twenty years after her husband was killed in Vietnam, filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn interviewed more than 200 American and Vietnamese women widowed by the war. She traveled to Vietnam to interview the Vietnamese widows and the scenes in Vietnam are haunting with their magnificent cinematography and graphic stories as told by the women. In between the interviews, and sometimes in the background, she uses rare archival footage to reinforce the individual stories.

The American women are living with the memories long after their husbands' deaths, wondering about what happened over there. There's a woman who wishes she had the nerve to smash her husband's hand to keep him from going, a woman whose husband wasn't killed in Vietnam, but came home sick with multiple cancers from Agent Orange, a Native American woman whose husband, a former rodeo rider, felt a racial connection to the Vietnamese people. Most of all though, it was the Vietnamese women whose stories were the most moving. After all, the war took place on their land. They also lost children and parents and had their homes burned down. Some of them were tortured and all of them have memories of murder and destruction. It is all so very very sad.

Yes, this is an anti-war film, produced many years after the Vietnam war, at a time when people would rather forget. But for those whose lives were forever altered, there is no forgetting. This film remembers.

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Boring, Anti-War, But Nice Camera Work
A boring anti-war peace that spends as much or more time on Vietnamese women as it does on American. One of the American women questions whether her husband may have been a murderer. The "lead" woman complains about her husband having been in "this" war. There's comments about how the Vietnamese people were never a threat to us.

When she finally gets to the place where her first husband died it seemed like she spent all of 30 seconds there and then went on. What happened there? What was the battle? How long did it last?

The drawing of where their spouse was injured was sobering. The visuals of Vietnam showed a lush, if backward, country. The title implied a discussion of American women, not war in general and the effect of the war on Vietnamese women -- which is more of what this documentary showed.