Regret to Inform

Starring:Xuan Ngoc Nguyen
Studio: Docurama
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential video
This 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
Description
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 hu

POV - 20th Anniversary Collection
Average customer rating:
POV - 20th Anniversary Collection
Starring: P.O.V. 20th Anniversary Collection
Manufacturer: Docurama
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video
Docurama | Series & Studios | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video
( P ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Documentary | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video
Used DVDs | Stores | DVD | Video | Action & Adventure | African American Cinema | Animation | Anime & Manga | Art House & International | Classics | Comedy | Cult Movies | Documentary | Drama | Educational | Fitness & Yoga | Gay & Lesbian | Horror | Kids & Family | Military & War | Music Video & Concerts | Musicals & Performing Arts | Mystery & Suspense | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Special Interests | Sports | Television | Westerns
Similar Items:

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (Widescreen Edition)

Pan's Labyrinth (New Line Two-Disc Platinum Series)

Babel

Jesus Camp

Volver

ASIN: B000KJU1J6
Release Date: 2007-02-27

Description

Fifteen unforgettable documentaries from the last 20 years of critically acclaimed P.O.V. films are packaged together for the first time in this beautiful, limited edition set.

Average customer rating:

Biased? Perhps, but not without merit.
One of the Best Vietnam War Documentaries I've Seen
subtle one-sidedness
Slanted perspectives gained through emotional manipulation
Cockeyed Perspective Taints Provocative Subject

Regret to Inform
Director: Xuan Ngoc Nguyen , Lucy Massie Phenix , and Ken Schneider
Manufacturer: Docurama
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Biography | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Military & War | Genres | DVD | Video

( R ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Daughter From Danang
Hearts and Minds - Criterion Collection
In the Year of the Pig
A Bright Shining Lie
Children Underground

ASIN: 0767024427
Release Date: 2000-05-02

Amazon.com essential video

This 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

Description

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 hu

Customer Reviews:

Biased? Perhps, but not without merit........2007-05-31

"Regret to Inform" as some have stated in their reviews here, does, perhaps, have an anti-war bias behind it, but it isn't like it is disguised or anything. The film merely poses these questions:

What are the costs of war?

How have women and families been effected by war?

What are the similarities and differences of the experiences that women in America and Vietnam have in regard to the war?

While some may say that pointing out the fact that Vietnam was no direct threat to America, and that the people of Vietnam suffered much more, and their trauma is much more lasting and deeper than those who had the luxury of not having bombs dropped on their neighborhoods, or soldiers accidentally shooting their family members, the fact is that these are truisms that one cannot escape.

There is an emphasis on those women who were caught on the "wrong" side of the conflict, and yes, we do meet some women who fought alongside the Communists, but this is the point. The filmmaker wanted to show what it was like for the people whom we considered the enemy, as well as those who were our own family.

The fact that there is no treatment of those who were victimized by their own countrymen is a valid criticism, and it would be nice to see that side of the picture as well.

However, the reviewer who dismisses the fact that a couple women that we meet were fighters with the Communists is a moot point. War effects everyone, no matter which side you take. The fact that the tour guide that the woman met in the village where her husband was killed had fought alongside the Communists in that same area was an ironic, and I thought very important part of the film. To leave it out just because she was on the side of the enemy would have been shallow, and not in the spirit of the film.

Over 30 years after the war ended for us, we need to go back and see with new eyes the legacy of what we were involved with. Just as with Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" there comes a time when you need to stop seeing a former enemy, and start seeing fellow human beings who suffered just as you did, regardless of what side they happened to be on.

One of the Best Vietnam War Documentaries I've Seen.......2006-10-20

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.

subtle one-sidedness.......2006-06-17

Definitely worth seeing for the interviews and the scenery, but you should be aware that the tone is slanted toward one side. Even though both sides are interviewed, the communists are portrayed as heroic, while the Americans are portrayed as confused and/or barbaric. Even though I don't agree with our involvement in Vietnam, I feel this film glosses over the fact that there were atrocities on both sides and that our reasons for being there were complex and difficult. Because of this, the film comes across less like a horror-of-war film and more like a pro-communist Vietnam film.

Slanted perspectives gained through emotional manipulation.......2005-08-19

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.

Cockeyed Perspective Taints Provocative Subject.......2005-04-18

This unique documentary clearly portrays some of the tragic effects of war on wives of soldiers from both sides of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately 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 guerillas on many innocent South Vietnamese and indigenous tribal men, women, children. Despite this distorted retrospective look, the film is well made and worth seeing. 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.

DVD:

DVD

DVD

DVD

The Karate Kid Part III

Our Man Flint

Gaslight [1940] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

DVD: The Thief

Die 39 Stufen - The 39 Steps