Conversations About Ships

Producer: Rini Yun Keagy

In the 90th decade of his life, a former merchant sailor recounts to his granddaughter stories of his maritime adventures on the world’s oceans during the 1930s. While the time period and events are romanticized by the filmmaker – his granddaughter – she also questions her grandfather’s fearlessness and his great luck, and she compares these characteristics to her own traumatic experiences of water through personal narration. Partially filmed at the Philadelphia shipyards where the grandfather once was docked during a heat wave in the summer of 1933, this poetic documentary reveals common and divergent cross-generational experiences through storytelling and conversation.

Rini Yun Keagy is a filmmaker and nomad. She has lived in four countries and many more cities, small towns, and farms. Her short film Yellow has screened at various festivals in the United States and Europe, winning a Merit Award at the James River Film Festival, and was curated for the film and video art international cable tv station Souvenirs from Earth which broadcasts in France and Germany. Ring of Fire, a short hand-painted animation, was screened at the Philadelphia and Siouxland film festivals, among others. By crossing boundaries of genre and convention, Rini’s film and video work seeks to ‘document’ and articulate the surreal in the experience of multi-ethnicity in America. Rini teaches in the Film & Media Arts Department at Temple University and has also taught at University of the Arts and Drexel University. Last year she collaborated with Sarah Christman and Laska Jimsen on MiND’s Philadelphia Stories 6 documentary Minding the Hive, about the disappearance of the world’s honeybees.