My Name Is Oona

My Name Is Oona is based on optically printed footage of Gunvor Nelson’s daughter, Oona. Inspiration for the film's soundtrack came when Nelson attended a Steve Reich performance in which he taped and processed comments and utterances by people who arrived at the gallery. A few years earlier, Reich had already taken part in the making of several films by her husband, Robert Nelson, for which he experimented with the same principles that would become central to his pioneering minimalist phase-pieces “It's Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out” (1966). For this film, he worked with recordings of Oona saying her name and repeating the names of the days of the week, looping and phase-shifting the phrases into a mesmerizing multi-rhythmic structure. Throughout the film, the reverberating polyphony intensifies before gently disappearing to give way to the lullaby sung by the loving voice of a mother humming to her child. Gunvor invited Patrick Gleeson - who later made a great score for Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976), amongst others - to create the final audio track, which she used to edit the image track. The result is a complex meditation on childhood, memory and identity, in which the interplay of sound and image generates something truly unique. (Stoffel Debuysere)