On January 1, 1968, Barbara Sonneborn's husband, Jeff Gurvitz, left to fight in the Vietnam War. 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 husband's death on her 24th birthday. "We regret to inform you..." read the official notice. When his personal effects were returned three months later, his dog tags and wedding ring were encrusted with his own blood.

The shock and grief eased with the years, but not the anger. On January 1, 1988, twenty years after Jeff's death in Vietnam, Sonneborn woke up suddenly determined to do something about his death. She began to write Jeff a heart-wrenching letter describing the impact that his death had on her life. She recalls the night before he left, writing, "You were so alive, so filled, filled with life....How could you not come back?" This ongoing letter is the narrative thread of REGRET TO INFORM.

In all those years Sonneborn had met only one other Vietnam War widow. She knew that she wanted to meet other widows from both sides of the conflict, to understand how their husbands' deaths had shaped their lives. What could be learned from these women's stories about war, loss, survival and healing after all these years? Sonneborn knew she had to go to Vietnam to find the place where her husband was killed and to talk to other widows.

Sonneborn reacted to her husband's death with anguish, torment, and many questions. While there were organizations to help Vietnam veterans, there were no such networks for Vietnam widows. And the unpopularity of that war further inhibited its victims from finding relief. Although Sonneborn, an accomplished photographer and a visual artist, had never made a film before, she decided that this would be her medium. Her documentary film REGRET TO INFORM is both her response to her experience and the agent of her catharsis.

Gravestone of Lula Bia's husband

In 1990, in preparation for her film, Sonneborn sent out thousands of letters and suddenly received many responses when the Gulf War began. "A lot of people who had suffered deeply and personally as a result of the Vietnam War - both veterans and widows - came out of the woodwork and spoke out in ways many had found impossible until then," Sonneborn remembers. Altogether, she interviewed over 200 women during pre-production and met with another 43 in person-25 of these in Vietnam.

To begin the film, Sonneborn initially raised $275,000 through grants, individual contributions, loans, and, finally, by mortgaging her house. In 1991, working with Vietnam veteran and video artist Daniel Reeves, she began shooting interviews in California. The time arrived, then, for the next destination on her journey: Vietnam.

After struggling through miles of red tape-aided in her efforts by Vietnam's sympathetic U.N. attaché-Sonneborn received an affirmative response from the Vietnamese government in late 1991. She and a five-member crew arrived in Bangkok in early 1992, only to find that the visas promised by her sponsor in Hanoi, the Ministry of Film, did not exist. Another urgent plea to the UN attaché cut through the last piece of red tape, and Sonneborn finally entered Vietnam to begin seven weeks of interviews and filming from north to south.

The women Sonneborn interviewed were both North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). (At that time it was dangerous for widows whose husbands died fighting for South Vietnam to speak out.) "They couldn't believe that an American Vietnam War widow really wanted to hear their stories," she recalls. They recounted the torture, murder, and incredible human damage caused by American bombs. "The cruelty we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean," describes one woman in the film. "If you weren't dead, you weren't safe," remembers another.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, who grew up in a poor South Vietnamese village in the 1950s but now lives in the U.S., acted as Sonneborn's translator. In the film, she becomes a symbol of the many contradictions of the Vietnam War. "For me," narrates Sonneborn, "Vietnam is the land of my imagination, but for Xuan, it is the land of memory." In 1968, at the age of 14, Xuan's home and village were destroyed. Her husband was killed fighting for the South Vietnamese just three years later. She witnessed her cousin blown apart by an American soldier. "I woke up when I was 40 with all this memory, all this pain, all this anger," she told Sonneborn. "What am I going to do with it? When people decide to go to war, they don't ask people like me, 'What's going to happen?'" The irony of her translating for Sonneborn among North Vietamese women, many of whom would have seen her as a collaborator, is not lost on the viewer.

REGRET TO INFORM is made up of deeply personal on-camera interviews, exceptional archival footage, and Sonneborn's memoir-like narration. When she finally reaches Que Son, the area where her husband died, Sonneborn is struck by the ordinariness of the once-ravaged landscape. While the film's scenes of the Vietnamese countryside-mist hovering over mountains, women toiling in rice paddies-are eerie and mysterious, they're also quite serene. "I was looking for the human and environmental effects," says Sonneborn. And the film contains many such poignant moments. An American war widow caressing the last letter she received from her husband, another woman talking about her husband who returned from the war only to die from the effects of Agent Orange. "It's not like the war is here and then it's over," the woman explains. "It starts when it ends." Or as Sonneborn herself observes, "War is a monster. You let it out of its cage and you can't tell it how to behave."

Back in the U.S., Sonneborn wrote grants to finish production. One of her aims was to include the perspective of Native American war widows. "I was committed to including Native American women because the first war in this country was against the Native American people. More than 40% of the Native Americans who were eligible to serve did so. The impact on their culture is enormous." With the help of a grant from the Arizona Humanities Council, she took a five-person production crew to the Navajo Nation. In one of the film's most moving interview segments, a Navajo woman from Chinle, Arizona, remarks, "Once he saw all of the killing...the Vietnamese looking just like him, just about the same skin color, the same height, I think that it really made him think, what am I doing here?" Sonneborn plans to use the extensive footage gathered in Arizona, as well as several interviews shot in Cambodia, in a subsequent film about war, healing, and reconciliation.

In 1995, Sonneborn began to craft a feature-length film from 80 hours of interviews and 40 more hours of B-roll footage. Sonneborn and two San Francisco area editors, Jennifer Chinlund and Vivien Hillgrove, whittled it down to five hours but, by 1996, the film was still not finished. There was no more money left so the editors had to move on to other projects.

Sonneborn borrowed more money and produced a 15-minute trailer, edited by Ken Schneider, to raise the money to finish the film. In 1997, Sonneborn brought on Janet Cole, a noted PBS producer experienced in social-issue filmmaking, to join the project. "I needed somebody very experienced and very good to help me complete the film," remembers Sonneborn. Cole recalls, "I was attracted by the potential of this film as a tool for social action and change." She brought in award-winning filmmaker Lucy Massie Phenix to finish the editing. "There is little consciousness of how sexist war is and of how women, as victims and as wives and mothers, are not taken into account," Phenix explains as she describes her focus. "What I always kept in front of me was the question: What is war, and how deep and far does it reach?"

The project attracted other impressive talent. Acclaimed cinematographer-director Emiko Omori was the cameraperson in Vietnam. Cinematographer Nancy Schiesari, who has shot award-winning films in England for years, and video artist and Vietnam War veteran Daniel Reeves, shot the U.S. interviews. Composer Todd Boekelheide scored the film's music. PBS sound and picture editor Ken Schneider co-edited the film with Phenix. Sonneborn insisted that the editing continue until the film was as visually poetic and as clear a message about the toll of war as she could imagine. Experimental filmmaker and "edit doctor" Nathaniel Dorsky was brought in at the end and cut another 15-20 minutes during the film's final polishing. "The strength of the material and what it's meant to do is why so many good people worked on it," states Phenix.