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Film chronicles a Vietnam War widow's voyage of healing and reconciliation
Saturday, January 8, 2000
By CECELIA GOODNOW
A knock at the door woke Barbara Sonneborn on the morning of her 24th birthday, in March 1968.
Outside was a military man, who had come to say that her husband, Jeff Gurvitz, was missing in action in Vietnam. Jeff's death in the Tet Offensive was soon confirmed, sending Sonneborn into a tailspin of anger and depression.
Two decades later, the remarried Sonneborn began what would become an 11-year journey of healing and reconciliation. The result is her beautiful and deeply affecting anti-war film "Regret to Inform," a 1999 Oscar nominee for best documentary.
The film will air Jan. 24 on KCTS/9 and other public-broadcast stations as part of the "P.O.V." series showcasing independent non-fiction films.
There also will be a big-screen opportunity for Seattle viewers who missed the film at last spring's Seattle International Film Festival and its four-day Varsity Theatre run last fall.
On Tuesday evening, "Regret to Inform" will play at a free public screening at the University of Washington. Following the 90-minute film, Sonneborn will lead a panel discussion on issues of war and peace.
There no doubt will be more events of this kind in the weeks leading up to April 30, the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.
"This is not a film about Vietnam," she said in her distinctively deep and stately voice. "It's a film about how war affects people's lives. I wanted to transform (Jeff's) death, which felt meaningless, into as powerful an anti-war statement as I could."
Sonneborn, 55, a photographer and visual artist, had no prior movie-making experience but realized a documentary film could reach a much broader audience than any sculpture she might create. She went on to write, direct and co-produce the film.
The fact that it took 11 years to amass the $750,000 needed to complete the project wasn't all bad. By the time "Regret to Inform" debuted last year, Sonneborn said, the public had grown more willing to revisit the complex and emotionally charged Vietnam War.
The film won awards for best director and best cinematography at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Movie critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "one of the most buzzed-about films" at Sundance.
The New York Times wrote that it was "so exquisitely filmed, edited and scored, it is the documentary equivalent of a tragic epic poem."
The film's narrative thread is Sonneborn's 1992 journey to the hillside in Que Son, near the Laotian border, where Jeff died trying to rescue his wounded radio operator during a mortar attack.
As she and her translator, Nguyen Ngoc Xuan of Portland make their long train trip through the Vietnamese countryside, we see scenes of timeless beauty -- rice paddies of emerald green, a lone oarsman paddling lazily down a river, hills veiled in mist.
Sonneborn planned it so.
"I realized war is so ugly," she said, "that it needs to be seen against a backdrop of beauty."
So it is with the widows -- American and Vietnamese -- who tell of their ordeals during and after the war. Their faces are dignified, serene, cordial -- their suffering as hidden as mortar scars beneath new-grown grass.
But as they tell their stories, the anguish of war pierces their careful facades. Eyes twitch, tears stream silently, mouths twist in despair.
In the universality of loss, we forget that some of these women, the ones from North Vietnam, were once our enemy.
"What's most important about this film," Sonneborn said, "is that it's not about sides. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. It's that war is wrong."
The Vietnamese government gave Sonneborn free access to widows from the north, including those whose families fought with the Viet Cong. But it blocked her from interviewing widows of South Vietnamese soldiers.
Sonneborn, who knew the film must represent all viewpoints, found a powerful voice in her translator, Nguyen, 46, who had endured horrendous suffering as a shell-shocked teenager in South Vietnam.
Although Nguyen was initially reluctant to speak on camera, she believed so strongly in the project that she quit her job in Eugene, Ore., to accompany Sonneborn to Vietnam.
"I feel I must do the film," Nguyen said by phone. "I feel it down to my bellybutton."
Nguyen, the seventh of 10 children, was 14 when her home in South Vietnam was bombed twice in four months.
Hiding in a bomb shelter, she watched as her 5-year-old cousin was blown to pieces by an American soldier as the child crept out of hiding to find water.
To survive, the traumatized teen began picking up soldiers in bars, and taking drugs to dull the shame of having to sell herself.
"My pain took over my brain and my spirit," said Nguyen, who eventually became suicidal.
"Sometimes I think I'm a bad person," she says in the film, "but in my heart I know I'm a good person. I wouldn't do the things I do if I have a choice."
Nguyen entered a common-law marriage with a South Vietnamese soldier who died in battle shortly before their son was born. The soldier's sister and brother now live in Seattle.
She later married an American military adviser and moved to Oregon shortly before the collapse of South Vietnam. They had two sons in their 11 years together.
Nguyen, now a bridal-gown designer in Portland, says the war was a source of tension between her and her second husband.
"His standpoint, as a military adviser, is we should bomb the shit out of that country to win the war," Nguygen said. "My viewpoint is, I'm the one on the ground getting bombed."
Sonneborn hopes that in telling their stories, women can begin to heal and develop compassion for other widows who suffered equally.
Sonneborn's own story, threaded throughout the film, climaxes with her arrival at the anonymous hillside where Jeff died. She had spent years trying to imagine this place, expecting that she would feel its pull like a divining rod.
"What surprised me," she says, "was that it looked ordinary, like any other hill. I kept looking at the hillside and it would just dissolve into battle and I could hear the screams, and then it would dissolve back and I would hear the birds and the crickets."
Looking ahead
Barbara Sonneborn and four war widows are traveling to major U.S. cities to promote peace and tell about an interactive, online war memorial that will be launched April 30.
The International Widows of War Memorial and Network for Peace will be part of an existing Web site, www.regrettoinform.org, which tells more about Sonneborn and her film, "Regret to Inform."
The text of the electronic memorial will be created by widows and other family members from around the world, who will be invited to list names of loved ones lost in war, along with brief accounts of the lives and deaths of those who perished.
SEATTLE-POST INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Speaking by phone from her Berkeley home, Sonneborn said the film has a universal message that goes beyond a particular war, beyond the death of her own husband.
"Regret to Inform" director Barbara Sonneborn contends her film is not about the Vietnam War, it's "about how war affects people's lives."
The tranquillity is jarring to anyone whose view of Vietnam is limited to grim news footage of the war. Against this pastoral backdrop, interwoven war scenes take on fresh horror as we reflect on the bombs and chemicals that rained on such a lovely land.
Tran Nghia fought for the communists in what was once North Vietnam. She is one of several Vietnam War widows in "Regret to Inform" who describe the pain of losing loved ones to the horrors of war.
WHAT: Free public screening of "Regret to Inform," Barbara Sonneborn's award-winning documentary about the Vietnam War. Afterward is a panel discussion with Sonneborn and five University of Washington scholars representing American Indian studies, history, social sciences, women's studies and geography.
WHEN: Tuesday, 6 to 8 p.m.
WHERE: University of Washington, Kane Hall, Room 210. Reservations not required but seating is limited.
ON THE TUBE: "Regret to Inform" will air on KCTS/9 at 10 p.m. Jan. 24.
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