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Rini Yun Keagy is a living hybrid. Her roots spread throughout the world with a Korean mother and a half-Guatemalan, half-Swiss-German father. Her lifeline is filmmaking, oftentimes incorporating non-conventional methodologies into her work.
The connection between her personal identity and artistic pursuits led her to a group of Cambodian youths that are the subject of her second film, "Under a Slanted Wall." The 30-minute documentary-style film is a thesis that will complete her graduate studies at Temple University where she will earn a master of fine arts degree from the film and media arts department in May.
Friday holds more immediate excitement for the resident of Ninth and South streets, when her first film, "Yellow," will be screened at the Khmer Art Gallery, the city’s only Cambodian art gallery at 319 N. 11th St., as part of a First Friday Trifecta.
The seven-minute exploration of Asian identity, using non-actors and playing over and over without sound, will be shown throughout the evening in a style Keagy describes as "non-traditional," the preferred method of the artist who is in her mid-30s. Before returning to the city where it was created, the film had been on the festival circuit for the past year, showing in France and California.
"I have found that the real people that you meet on a day-to-day basis are so much more interesting than the people that we see on the screen quite often," she said.
Keagy formulated her approach based on her childhood, which she said wasn’t always easy. She spent the first six years in Guatemala, before her father — a coffee farmer — moved the family to San Luis Obispo, Calif. She never quite felt at home in the place she described as beautiful but predominately white with most of her friends’ parents being white-collar professionals while her father stayed with farming.
She left for college, graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a geography degree. This led to becoming a cartographer and graphic designer for travel guide publisher Lonely Planet in Oakland.
Keagy was never quite fulfilled on the job — despite living in Paris for six months and doing a good deal of traveling — and she left in 2000 after four years for New York City where a network of Berkeley alum and an outlet for filmmaking could be found.
An internship at PBS flagship station WNET got Keagy hooked on producing, and helped her realize her passion was attainable.
"Everybody I met was a filmmaker," she said. "I thought, ‘Wow they’re actually making a living at this, it’s not necessarily something only privileged people do.’"
Freelancing as a production assistant for the station, a peer recommended she look at Temple’s film program. After being offered a full scholarship, fellowship and stipend, Keagy finally began to live out her dream, and made the move to South Philly in ’03.
"South Philly is a real neighborhood, it’s got history," she said "It’s not like Center City. Center City is really boring to me. It’s nice and there’s businesses and stuff, but you don’t get that sensation that there’s working class people that have lived there for years and years."
Keagy feels the city overall is racially segregated, but coming home means letting all of the stereotypes slip away. "It’s one of the few neighborhoods in all the city of Philadelphia where it feels racially integrated in a really good way. Where there’s Indonesians living next to African Americans, living next to Italians, living next to Hondurans. I think that’s what I relate to in South Philly."
Since moving south, the area has served as an outlet for Keagy to grow as an artist and filmmaker, allowing her to express herself in ways her previous career did not.
"One of the things that graphic designers feel that they lack in their lives is content," she said. "They create compositions, which can be beautiful, but there’s not necessarily a story behind it."
Seeking refuge from superficiality, Keagy set out to craft a very intimate thesis in September ’06. By reference of a Cambodian friend, she was lead to a group of six Cambodian artists — living around Morris and 16th streets and Sixth and Federal streets — between the ages of 17 and 22. It was a good match from the beginning.
"As soon as I met them I really liked them," she said. "I started interviewing them unofficially, and then started hanging out with them, finding out stuff about their lives."
Keagy encouraged them to send her e-mails about their days and, after building a friendship with the artists, said she would receive "stream of consciousness" responses, a unique way to become acquainted with her subjects. The film will feature the artists in their everyday lives, whether playing video games, communicating with friends on MySpace and Xanga or creating art. Keagy uses several types of cameras, including digital and 16-millimeter, as well as incorporating home videos and archival footage provided by the artists. She is a one-woman show — from pre-production to shooting to directing to editing — mostly within the artists’ neighborhoods and homes.
"I’m trying not to limit it to just, ‘This is a film about Cambodian-American identity’ because what I’m trying to say is that we’re all humans and this is a film about what it means to be a human being, a young human being in the year ’07," she said. "What I’m focusing on is the kind of innate issues when you are someone of a very hybrid identity. And somebody who has connections to several homelands and yet [they] don’t feel like [they] have a home anywhere.
"Self-expression is an artistic medium — for the immigrant mentality — that is reserved for a privileged level, and I want to encourage these kids that even though they don’t have the privilege, even though they don’t have the money, that it’s not completely out of the question.
It is something the filmmaker feels and knows on a personal level.
"What happened to me is I was very stifled, I was told over and over again by society that you can’t make a living by being an artist, and so I avoided it for so long and yet I came right back to it. You really can only follow your heart and if you’re good at something that’s what you need to be doing."
Although their skills vary from drawing to designing to painting and sewing, each youth has a specialty they are free to express in a community that is very open to ethnicity and aspiring artists, Keagy said.
Reaching out to the Cambodian artists, she said, has helped her not only spend a majority of her time in her neighborhood, but come to appreciate it even more. Filming will continue through October and be completed by her graduation.
Plans to move to New York post-graduation will most likely not change, but without her time here, Keagy may never have captured such a specific slice of modern-day life.
"It’s the kind of neighborhood I’ve always lived in," she said, referring to her homes in New York, Paris, Spain and San Francisco. "It’s an ethnic neighborhood where it really feels alive, authentic and genuine. Real things are going on; people are living their lives. Real people are more interesting to me."
