REGRET TO INFORM
A Sun Fountain Production
Produced by Janet Cole and Barbara Sonneborn Principal
Photography by Emiko Omori
Directed by Barbara Sonneborn
70 min.
Twenty years after losing her husband Jeff in the Vietnam War, director Barbara Sonneborn realized that she had never gotten over it. Happily remarried for many years and with a very rich life, she decided to seek out other widows, to learn how they had come to terms with losing love ones to the Vietnam War. Scores of American and Vietnamese women are interviewed. With Vietnam widow Xaun Nguyen Evans, Sonneborn takes us on a journey from Xuan's homeland in South Vietnam to Que Sanh in the north, the site of Jeff's death.
BARBARA SONNEBORN was born in Chicago in 1944 and has been a working artist for 22 years. Primarily a photographer, she has worked and exhibited in other media including sculpture and theatrical set design. Her photographs are held in private and museum collections and were shown in the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art's "Photography of the Decade." Her awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 1998 Rockefeller Fellowship for Regret to Inform, her first film.
JANET COLE is currently producing Pink Triangle with directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for Channel Four and HBO/Cinemax. Her producing credits include POSITIVE: Life with HIV (ITVS; PBS, 1996); Absolutely Positive (directed by Peter Adair: 1991 P O.V.); We the People (PBS, 1987); and The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. Since 1997, she has served as president of the Film Arts Foundation board, in San Francisco.