Interesteg What makes it different from others?

SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

Jacomedi A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Mike B 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.

hupfons5 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.

dgnfly 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.

Daniel Marrin This is a heartbreaking Oscar-nominated film, 7 years in the making, that brings a war I've only known as history, being 20, to vivid, poignant, and brutally honest life. Sonnenborn brings the Vietnam war home from a bold new perspective- the war's widows, both American and Vietnamese. Sonnenborn herself is such a widow, and so the film's journey to the past begins with her own personal trek to Vietnam, searching for the ordinary field where her husband Jeff was killed. As much as the film depicts the spiritual suffering of American soldiers and their families, it reveals the Vietnamese in the same suffering, a decent people forced to do the unimaginable to survive in war.Sonnenborn brilliantly combines peaceful images of the modern Vietnam with brutal up-front news footage from the war. The soundtrack is a mix of atmospheric music, the testimony of Vietnamese survivors describing their ordeal, and American widows reciting their husbands' words, through letters sent home during the war.I don't know why it is we constantly separate the documentary genre- this is a drama, a social and political film, and just because it has no major actors and relies totally on reality should not disqualify it from showing in your local multiplex. It is a powerful, memorable picture, not just "another documentary." It makes you think and reflect about why we went into war, and it provokes many of the emotions for which we all seek film. "Regret to Inform" piercingly reveals how the souls, the humanity, of soldiers and civilians die in war. Seek this film out, whether you lived through Vietnam or not. It will affect you.