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Description: Last year Lucy Massie Phenix edited "Regret to Inform," a deeply personal, yet universal portrayal of the lasting devastation of war through the eyes of women, Vietnamese and American widows of the Vietnam war. It is a story of one woman's journey, Barbara Sonneborn, to Vietnam, twenty years after her husband was killed there, and the women she encounters who were affected by the war. A very powerful, yet quiet film, "Regret to Inform" develops a yet-unseen perspective: that of those left behind. Nominated for this year Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary and winner of the Indie Spirit Award and Sundance Film Festival. Biography: Barbara Sonneborn has worked as a photographer, sculptor, and set designer for 26 years. She designed and directed all visual aspects of Jean-Claude Van Itallie's play Bag Lady, which was produced in New York at the Theater for the New City. She photographed and directed the use of projections in The White Buffalo, produced at Princeton University. Her artwork has been exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and can be seen in New Directions in Photography, a book edited by then New York Metropolitan Museum of Art curator of photography Weston Naef. Her photographs are also included in many private and museum collections. Her awards include a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multi-Media Fellowship, the International Documentary Association Award for Distinguished Achievement/ABC News VideoSource Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, Academy Award (Oscar®) Nomination for Best Documentary, Sundance Jury Awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography, the Independent Spirit ³Truer than Fiction² Award IFP/West, and the Golden Spire Award (San Francisco International Film Festival). Regret to Inform is Sonneborn's first film. Her future plans include writing a book about the widows of the Vietnam war, and developing further films that explore the psychological and societal impact of war. Janet Cole has worked on a variety of issues: social stratification, gender, homosexuality, ecology, racism, disabilities only to mention a few. A Palo Alto resident, Cole has seemingly tackled the world with her films. Lucy Massie Phenix is an acclaimed documentarist, working in the field for almost thirty years as an editor, producer and director. Her film "You got to Move"(1985), about the grassroots social change in the South, was chosen by the MacArthur Foundation to be in its video collection in public libraries throughout the U.S. She was one of the filmmakers who made Winter Soldier (1971), a documentary about and with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War at the Winter-soldier Investigation in Detroit. Prize winner at Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, screened at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City and televised once by WNET, but largely ignored during the Vietnam War by American press and distributors. Two years after Phenix worked on "What Do We Do Now?" she collaborated with six other members of the Mariposa Film Group on two hour classic documentary on the experience of twenty-six gay women and men in the US. Phenix worked in 1980 as an editor on award winning documentary "The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter" a story of women involved in skilled trades during the World War Two. The impetus for her work a producer/director/editor on "Cancer in Two Voices"(1993) was the death of her sister, Spivey, to breast cancer in 1989. The documentary is an intimate portrait of two women who speak openly about who they are as Jews, lesbians, friends and lovers. Last year Lucy Massie Phenix edited "Regret to Inform", a deeply personal, yet universal portrayal of the lasting devastation of war through the eyes of women, Vietnamese and American widows of the Vietnam war. Nominated for this year at the Academy Awards for Best Feature Documentary and winner of the Indie Spirit Award and Sundance Film Festival. Contact
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