LAMENT Oh husband, where are you? You are now at the Golden River. Your children ask for you all the time. They asked where you were going? I said you went to serve your country. Why did you go? You've caused us so much pain. My life is now incomplete. What love is deeper than ours? Even the love of country is not deeper than the love we have together.

The film follows Sonneborn's journey to Khe Sahn, where Jeff was killed, and weaves together the stories of widows from both sides of the American-Vietnam war. According to the New York Times, REGRET TO INFORM is "so exquisitely filmed, edited and scored it is the documentary equivalent of a tragic epic poem….Every word and image quivers with an anguished resonance."

The National Asian American Telecommunications Association and POV, PBS's award-winning showcase of independent non-fiction films, present the broadcast premiere of REGRET TO INFORM on PBS on Monday, January 24, 2000, at 10:00 PM EDT (check local listings). The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won the Best Director and Best Cinematography Documentary awards at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

When Sonneborn began this project in 1988, she had met only one other American war widow. Propelled by a desire to meet other women who had experienced the same loss on both sides of the war, and to understand what could be learned about war through their stories, Sonneborn put together a production team in 1990 and sent out several thousand letters searching for widows in the U.S. The women were difficult to find.

Phan Ngoc Dung and her late husband (translated below) We were all put in different rooms and tortured separately. When I saw my daughter, she said to me, "Mother, I saw father. He couldn't walk. Someone had to help him - he was limping." My sister later told me, because my daughter loved my husband very much, when she saw her father taken to that room, she asked to go to the bathroom over and over in order to pass by the room and see her father. That was my daughter's last image of her father.

With the help of many Vietnam war veterans, the press, and other survivors as she found them, Sonneborn spoke with more than 200 American widows during pre-production for the film. "Many of these widows - as well as the veterans and children of soldiers killed in the war - shared their experiences in ways they couldn't before," she says. "I was overwhelmed by how the suffering from the war continued."

In 1992, Sonneborn traveled to Vietnam, accompanied by Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, a South Vietnamese woman whose first husband was killed in the war fighting for South Vietnam. Xuan later married an American soldier and moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s. She agreed to serve as Sonneborn's translator on the trip and to share her own story in the film. On their journey through Vietnam - where some 2 to 3 million people were killed during the war - they found that everyone had a story to share about loss and devastation from the war. "[The women in Vietnam] were quite surprised and very moved that an American widow wanted to hear their stories," Sonneborn recalls. "The women recounted in painful detail the human and environmental damage caused by what they call the American war in Vietnam." One woman in the film describes, "The cruelty we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean." Another adds, "If you weren't dead, you weren't safe."

Bodies of American soldiers being shipped home April Burns: I received this wallet in the mail, in a package, with some letters that I had written to my husband, and a few other things. And when I received it, it had mud on it. And that was the closest I felt I could get to him physically. It was something of - I got to at least smell the earth of Vietnam, get some sort of feeling of what it, what he might have experienced, what he was surrounded with.

In REGRET TO INFORM, widows from both sides speak out, putting a human face on the all-too-often overlooked casualties of armed conflict: those who remain in the war's aftermath. Intercut with beautiful scenes of the serene Vietnamese countryside and shocking archival footage from the war years, the women's voices form an eloquent international chorus calling for peace. REGRET TO INFORM is a powerful meditation on loss and the devastation of all war on a personal level. It is a love story, and a deeply moving testament to the healing power of compassion.