Three Women’s Documentaries Examine the Pain and Legacy of War

Twenty years after her husband returned from Vietnam in a flag-draped casket, his dog tags encrusted with blood, Barbara Sonneborn woke up one morning determined to write about her grief.

Those first words begun as a letter to her husband became the award-winning documentary “Regret to Inform,” a poetic and powerful memoir that considers the legacy of the Vietnam War for widows on both sides of the conflict.

The lasting impact of another war compels Emiko Omori, director of “Rabbit in the Moon,” to revisit the makeshift desert barracks where she and 120,000 other Japanese Americans spent World War II.

And 50 years after the Japanese lost that war, freeing thousands of sex slaves, Korean women have begun to step out of the shadows of shame to force the Japanese to acknowledge their war crimes. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s feature documentary, “Silence Broken,” gives voice to Korea’s “comfort women.”

All three films, showing at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, are indeed about war, though none is about combat. Perhaps representing a new generation of war films, they focus not on the soldiers who fought and died but on the women and families left behind.

“Women suffer differently from men during war,” says Omori, who also served as Sonneborn’s cinematographer in Vietnam. “Women bear children and are the caretakers. They’re not the ones with the guns; they’re just trying to live their lives.”

The films show how war, in robbing women of health, family and hearth, tested values such as loyalty, faith and trust. They also question what compelled women to keep silent about their suffering for decades.

“I did find myself avoiding the war, but it’s something that informs our lives,” Omori says. “It’s still one of the first things someone will ask a [Japanese-American] stranger about our age: ‘What camp were you in?’ ”

Sonneborn’s husband, Jeff Gurvitz, went off to war in January 1968. She learned of his death eight weeks later, on the day she turned 24.

For years her husband’s death haunted her. She encountered only one other war widow during the years when vets were branded “baby killers.” When a tape he recorded arrived after his death, she packed it away.

“This was an unpopular war. We had another element to deal with, and that was: What did they die for? And what did they do when they were there?”

It took her 20 years to summon up the courage to listen to the tape of her husband’s voice and to seek answers. In 1992, she went to Vietnam--where the war is called the “American War”--accompanied by translator Xuan Ngoc Evans, a South Vietnamese woman whose first husband was killed in combat and whose second husband was a U.S. soldier.

“I knew I had to do something about women, widows on both sides of the conflict,” says Sonneborn, 55, of Berkeley.

The film, produced by Janet Cole, won documentary-directing and -cinematography awards at Sundance. A moving mix of memoir, interviews and some stunning archival footage, it has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.

Omori says shooting “Regret” and hearing the women’s stories of survival influenced her own film, then in its early stages.

“It gave me an understanding about our camp experience,” she says. “I got real interested in what was happening with the women.”

Her own mother died of a bleeding ulcer a year out of the camps.

“It occurred to me . . . that we never talked about the camps, and I had always felt that our mother’s death was connected to the camps,” says Omori, who lives in San Francisco. She had always felt that her mother was too traditionally Japanese to survive such indignities.

Omori’s mother was born in the United States but reared in Japan. Her father was Japanese-born. But Omori and her older sister, Chizuko, were Americans, 1 1/2 and 12 years old when the Omoris were sent to an Arizona concentration camp in 1942 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

While there, sleeping on hay-filled sacks and sharing one room with two other families, internees were ordered to fill out a questionnaire designed to determine their loyalty. Would they serve in the U.S. Army? Would they give up allegiance to the Japanese emperor?

Some asked for repatriation to Japan; others proved their loyalty by enlisting. But there also was a little-known resistance by “no-no boys,” those who rejected both questions.

Japanese Americans left the camps a fractured community that has never completely recovered, she says. Simply looking at the night sky reminds Omori of the struggle she inherited: At first she’d see the man in the moon, then she’d see the rabbit of Japanese tradition.

“What the government asked of us was to stop seeing the rabbit,” she says in the film.

The film won documentary-cinematography honors at Sundance. Footage from home movies taken before the war and inside the camps provides a rare glimpse into Japanese-American life in the ‘40s; government reels now betray the travesty of the incarceration.

At the same time, in Asia, the Japanese surrender meant freedom for 200,000 women in military brothels, most of them Korean. For four decades, the women then listened as the Japanese denied they were forced into sexual servitude.

In 1991, the women began stepping forward. They speak in “Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women” of being seized by soldiers, of girls as young as 12 forced to see up to 100 men a day. Many were beaten, drugged and made infertile.

One woman refuses to feel shame though she lost the chance to bear children. “I want to die as a daughter of Korea,” she says proudly, clad in an elegant traditional gown.

In all three films, moments of serenity contrast with brutal images of torture and death. Water lapping at a boat plying the waters off Vietnam, a voice soaring in song. The quiet roar of a waterfall in the Korean mountain countryside. The snowcapped Sierra rising above the cactuses of the Manzanar camp.

There is beauty even in a landscape of horror. Years after the barracks were torn down, a farmer dug up a rusty oil barrel that internees had filled with tiny, polished stones, each painted with a word.

She and other survivors are like those river rocks, Omori says.

“To bury them like a time capsule, people wanted us not to forget how we had all shattered and scattered and couldn’t come back together in quite the same way. They’ve become messengers,” she says. “When I would want to give up, they were a reminder that I owed it--to my history, to the community.”