Regret to Inform

Documentary film doesn't get any better than Barbara Sonneborn's heart-wrenching look at the grief left behind, on all sides, by the Vietnam War. In 1968, the director's young husband was killed in a mortar attack. Married again and happy, she was drawn more than 20 years later to talk to other war widows about their lives after loss. Her master stroke is to interview both American and North Vietnamese women, and to piece their tales into a mosaic of pain that knows no national boundary. "It isn't just the war is here and then it's over," one widow says. "It starts when it ends."

Sonneborn is a spare and eloquent narrator, resisting the temptation to place her own quest for understanding ahead of those of the many women she meets. And she's not afraid to let pictures and sound do the talking. Rarely has a documentary so filled with riveting interviews been so lushly visual as well. The director's images of Vietnam, stunningly shot by Emiko Omori and scored to traditional music, would haunt even if they weren't so clearly tied to the desecration of a land and the loss of innocence that two nations are still suffering.

-- Scott Heller