Regret to Inform

On her 24th birthday, Barbara Sonneborn is informed that her husband Jeff has died in Vietnam. Twenty years later, in 1988, she decides to make a film about the Vietnam War. In the company of the South-Vietnamese widow Xuan Ngoc Evans, she travels to the place where Jeff fought and spent his final hours. She worked her own experiences - the many questions and the grief - and those of a number of other war widows from the United States and Vietnam into a cinematic search for the answer to the question: why? The poignant conversations she has with all these women, combined with stock footage of the war and photographs and letters from the time, make the film a point-blank indictment of all wars, from a perspective that so far had remained undiscussed. The harrowing stories of these women reveal to what extent the war has left its marks on the lives of those who stayed behind.