best movie i've ever seen.

A Major Disappointment

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A unique documentary film on the Vietnam War and wars in general. Its' focus is on the widows' of war. These are widows' who will always experience the trauma of war. This documentary was made 25 years after the end of the war. Part of it's' focus is on one woman's return to the site her husband had died during the war.The great strength of this film is it also speaks with Vietnamese women whose husbands were killed. Because their country experienced the war directly their stories are very different and more intense.Like other great films on war this clearly points out that one's pain of war never goes away. The war lives on in one's life forever. One woman recounted that she felt her husband's name should have been at the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC. He committed suicide seven years after the end of the war and the reasons' were directly connected to Vietnam. Another woman's husband died from the effects of Agent Orange. In a recent commentary Canadian Romeo Dallaire, who has experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, said that the number of suicides of Vietnam War veterans was far higher than the general population. He said these suicides would raise significantly the count of American war dead from Vietnam.

As a Vietnamese who was born more than 10 years after the Vietnam War, I learned about the War at school, through my parents, through my grandparents; I watched the War on TV, I listened about the War on radio, and I celebrated our victory of the War with my people every April. But then, I rarely think about the War; The War isn't something very real to me, it is history. Watching Regret to Inform, I was saying to myself "Oh! The War was actually happen, it was real". The number of deaths is not just raw statistics in my history book, the film make me realized behind the numbers are husbands who had wives and children waited for them. I'm very fortune that both my grandfathers, my uncle, my host dad Mike are not in the statistic. After watching Regret to inform, a moving documentary film with heartbroken testimonies of American and Vietnamese widows of the War, I recognized how careless I'm; I was born only 11 years after the War.

This unique documentary clearly portrays some of the tragic effects of war on wives of soldiers from both sides of the Vietnam War.(SPOILER) The director (whose husband was killed in action in that war) blames the US and the South Vietnamese governments for those tragedies and fails to mention the dreadful atrocities inflicted by the Vietnamese Communist guerrillas on many innocent South Vietnamese and indigenous tribal men, women, children.Despite this slanted retrospective look, the film is well made and worth seeing. (SPOILER) The film's most redeeming premise is that war indelibly alters the lives of all who suffer the trauma and loss that occurs during wartime.

We ran this film at the "Normal" theater, for the Illinois Wesleyan May term series. The director, Barbara Sonneborn, introduced the film, and was on hand after for questions.Our audience was mixed with college students and adults. I am sure the students saw it has history, but the adults had lived this as history. I was one of the adults. Not until this film, did I see the Vietnam war, as more than just a page of history that I missed.During the showing, all you could hear besides the film, was the muffled sound of the projector. After the film, there were 200 plus people on their feet to applaud Barbara.