Visiting Filmmakers Series: Jeremy Workman with School for Defectors

Visiting Filmmakers Series

Tuesday, October 20, 2026 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, Cinema

Jeremy Workman will visit George Mason University on Tuesday Oct 20. Please join us for two events.

Jeremy Workman is a documentary filmmaker praised for creating character portraits that bring you deep inside extraordinary worlds. His newest film, School for Defectors, tells the story of a tiny school in South Korea where all the students are North Korean defectors.

Jeremy will be on campus for two public events on October 20.

1 Masterclass: Jeremy Workman makes movie trailers.
Oct 20, 1:30pm. Monson Grand Tier, Center for the Arts.

Widely known in the indie community as a trailer editor in his role as the Creative Director of Wheelhouse Creative, Jeremy has edited or overseen dozens of movie trailers, featurettes, tribute montages, and fundraising sizzles for a range of clients.

He recently presented his Four Favorite Trailers for Letterboxd.

2 Screening and discussion of School for Defectors. Oct 20, 5pm, Johnson Center Cinema

In an industrial corner of Busan, South Korea, stands the tiny Jangdaehyun School. It is home to 20 students, all of whom are North Korean defectors. Executive Produced by Daniel Dae Kim, School for Defectors offers unprecedented access to a community never seen on film.

Jeremy Workman's documentaries have garnered significant recognition, playing at major film festivals and seeing global releases in theaters, television, and on streaming platforms.

Jeremy is a two-time Emmy nominee and member of Academy. His films include Secret Mall Apartment (2024, stream on Netflix), Deciding Vote (2023, stream on The New Yorker) (Lily Topples the World (stream on MAX), The World Before Your Feet (2018, stream on Prime), and Magical Universe (2013, stream on AMC+).

Secret Mall Apartment premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, going on to win 12 major film festival awards. Executive Produced by actor Jesse Eisenberg, it was released theatrically in over 300 theaters in 2025, becoming the fifth-highest grossing documentary since 2020 (excluding music concert films). It dropped on Netflix in January 2026 and instantly entered the Netflix TOP 10, outperforming nearly every documentary on the platform. Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Secret Mall Apartment has been widely featured in national publications, parodied on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and is now being developed as both a musical and a scripted movie.

He is now at work on Whiz-Bang!, a madcap journey into the world of Rube Goldberg artists, featuring Joseph Herscher.

Collectively, Jeremy Workman's documentaries have earned a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, across more than 200 reviews. Workman is also hard at work on his next film, Whiz-Bang!, a madcap, chain-reaction-filled journey into the gleeful world of Rube Goldberg artists.

Our host for the evening is Dr. Young Jung. As an interdisciplinary scholar in Mason's Modern and Classical Languages, her research and teaching focus on critical cultural studies, media and reception studies, and popular narrative studies. A key theme throughout her work is that contact zones of people and cultural products illuminate the crossroads of migration, mediation, and reception. She published an ethnography, Korean Kirogi Families: Placemaking, Belonging, Mothering (Bloomsbury, 2024) and an article, “Squid Games, Transcultural Fan Parodies: Black and Queer Adaptations," that analyzes fans' user-created parody texts on YouTube and their comments reflecting international fans' engagement with transcultural receptions of Squid Game.

Professor Jung teaches modern Korean literature, pop culture, and Korean cultural studies at Mason. She created the Minor in Korean Studies in 2017, the Southeastern area's first BA Concentration in Korean in 2019, and the BAM and MA in Korean in 2026.

In 2026, she was named a CHSS Distinguished Alumni – Faculty honoree.

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