April 2, 1999 -- We're moving, sliding, gliding, floating slowly, but always moving, whether by small rowboat or by train. The pastoral rural scenes pass by, quiet and peaceful.

Barbara Sonneborn is on a journey. She was 24 years old when she learned her husband, Jeff, had been killed in Vietnam. "One morning, the 20th anniversary of his death, I woke up and I knew I had to go to Vietnam." Thus began the making of her award winning film, "Regret to Inform," which was also nominated this year for an Oscar for Feature Documentary.

Sonneborn, happily remarried, realized that she had never really come to terms with Jeff's death. Xuan Ngoc Evans, a Vietnam widow and a friend, accompanies Sonneborn. Six American and nine Vietnamese widows are interviewed and share their thoughts and memories with Sonneborn.

"For me, Vietnam is the land of my imagination, but for Xuan, it is a land of memory." Each widow suffers a personal loss, but together, they share a common need to find inner peace. The film captures touching and painful memories from a rare and unusual perspective, the widows of soldiers from both sides of the war. While they search for understanding, it becomes clear for the widows that this war was brutal for many who were not soldiers. It was literally brutal for Vietnamese women (and their children) and equally, a nightmare for the young American women.

Clinging to letters from their husbands, they try to understand why they went, what was happening to them, hoping for their return. As Sonneborn looks out the train window, nearing her destination of Que Sanh where her husband was killed, she ponders not just his death, but war, and particular this war in this small nation. "The closet I could get to the war was on television, but that was not the war. I could never imagined what was happening here." For Xuan, who was 14 when her home was bombed, the "American war" was not black and white, but "confusing, all gray."

These memories from women of two very different cultures and from two very different perspectives, one from the scene of the war and another from across the Pacific Ocean do not clash, but mesh into a mutual view of the war. As one American widow questions, "Was it murder? I don't see my husband as a murderer. But at the same time, we have to look at it for what it is.

It is murder. Is it justifiable?" Sonneborn remembers talking with her husband about going to this war, but not about his killing people. "We had not talked honestly about war." She finally arrives at Que Sanh and meets another widow, who also fought in the war at this very site. Maybe she had fought against her husband, Jeff. We watch Sonneborn gaze about the area. "So this is the place. After years of imagining it, it is so ordinary. This is where you died Jeff. Who else died here that day?"

Death and destruction by war is not just a present thing, but lingers, wounding for years, even decades. A Vietnamese widow advises her to continue on the road and try to heal from the war. "It will make us feel better that you tried." For Sonneborn and the other widows in this film, their journey of healing has begun.

The film's images of Vietnam today are stunning. We are also given time to take in the visuals, allowing natural sound to play out the scenes rather than hear from a narrator. Not overwhelming Sonneborn's personal journey, the use of the archival footage is sparing, but useful, linking the past with the present. The film won Sonneborn a Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival and her photographer, Emiko Omori, Best Cinematography. The International Documentary Association gave the film their ABCNews VideoSource award.

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Mike McElreath can be reached via e-mail as MikeM@uwyo.edu