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REGRET TO INFORM (1998)
Barbara Sonneborn, director
A common complaint about filmic representations of the Vietnam war, particularly those produced in Hollywood, is that the films tend to focus too narrowly on the personal relationships of the characters involved, ignoring not only the political context of the war but also the viewpoint of its Vietnamese participants. This trend is perhaps epitomized in Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978), where the particulars of the Vietnam War are largely overlooked and the conflict is presented as little more than a plot device that sets the film's romance and melodrama into motion. In short, Hollywood's emphasis on personal struggles and triumphs acts to obscure the politics of the war and
the larger power structures that lie behind the military actions.
The task of situating the Vietnam War within its geo-political context has traditionally fallen to documentary or non-fiction films, most notably Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds (1974), two of the three feature length films produced about the war while it was taking...