Creative Migrations:
Jeremiah Overman
From 4N Issue 3, October 2025
In his early twenties, Jeremiah Overman was a college dropout who had never left the United States. After having a nomadic upbringing living all over the US, the idea of joining his friend on an impulsive move to Cambodia wasn’t far-fetched. This initiated a decade-long immersion in the country, where he built international community and a new career in filmmaking.
He made friends in Cambodia’s local film industry, and started his own company, Turren Films, producing documentaries, narrative films, and commercial projects. He became a point of contact for both local and international film crews interested in shooting in Cambodia, and his music videos with renowned Cambodian rapper and producer VannDa have archived millions of views on YouTube. In 2024, he decided to return to the US, with a renewed interest and curiosity in his home country, and a new venture into the next stage of his filmmaking career.
Find Jeremiah at turrenfilms.com
Interview by Wen-You Cai
San Francisco -> Phonm Penh
WYC: How did you end up in Cambodia?
JO: In 2014 I was living in San Francisco, working at this cafe on Potrero Hill that was, funnily enough, owned by a Cambodian woman. My friend Cade wanted to move to Southeast Asia to teach English, and was convinced we only needed to have two grand to make the move.
WYC: And he’s American, too?
JO: He’s American. I was 24 and didn’t even have a passport. Originally we thought about moving to Thailand, but there was a coup in 2014. So we ended up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I started hanging out at this park called Wat Botum and skateboarding with the kids there, filming skate videos with Cade’s GoPro. This park is very similar to Washington Square Park, like a little melting pot for creativity. People who were into music, skateboarding, film, and photography, would hang out there, and now a lot of them are making moves creatively in the country. I made business cards that said I’m a filmmaker (I had no proof of this except for these skate videos) and started giving them out.
WYC: What was your filming experience prior to that?
JO: In high school, my folks got me a mini DV camera and Final Cut Express, and I started making videos. I wasn’t doing great in high school, and I discovered that the film school I wanted to go to in Portland wouldn’t require an SAT score. The art institute was the only school I was accepted into. I was in Indiana when I started doing film stuff, and when I got to Portland I realized the other kids in film school were just leagues ahead of me. That, along with having an affinity for substances, I didn’t feel like I would ever be able to measure up. After three years at the Art Institute of Portland, the school asked me to go to a community college to try to get my grades up. I dropped out and stopped doing anything film-related for several years. So I was over the moon when I got hired by this guy in Cambodia to follow him around with a camera.
He was basically a visa lawyer, but this guy was a menace. He wanted to pitch a reality TV show about himself, so I filmed him six days a week for six months doing all kinds of things—yelling at his clients on the phone, trying to buy and flip these old apartments. This was the first time I had ever been paid to do film work. I didn’t have equipment so I used his camera and his computer, watching tutorials and learning all the stuff I should have learned while I was in film school. I was making $250 each month.
WYC: Can you live off of $250 a month in Cambodia?
JO: You can live, you can survive, but it wasn’t great. The majority of people in Phnom Penh do. Foreigners usually aim for $1,200 per month, so for a foreigner my income was quite low. I lived in an apartment that was $50 a month. It was on the ground floor, and had one power outlet for the whole place. The owner lived on the property, which was gated, and he’d lock the gates at 9:30 p.m. So if you weren’t home by 9:30, then you weren’t home, and it was a little dangerous. You have to park your motorcycle inside the apartment at night so it doesn’t get stolen. It was a little rough.
After working for the lawyer for six months, I came back to the US to help my dad work on his house, and he offered to pay me. I thought I might be able to get enough money to buy a decent camera if I did. While I was home doing this work, I wondered if I should go back or if my Cambodia trip was done. In the end I bought a secondhand T3i.
WYC: What was the driving factor for you to return to Cambodia?
JO: Regardless of how much, people were paying me to use a camera and it felt like I had this second chance because I had really fucked up by not taking school more seriously. I found the real cash cow there working for the NGOs. In the US somebody might be a wedding filmmaker to make more money, in Cambodia, there were so many NGOs and lots of filmmakers would make documentaries for UNICEF. I met a few guys doing this, and they hired me to carry their equipment around and be their second camera. Eventually I started working for UNICEF with one of the guys as the producer. I didn’t really want to make NGO videos, but this gave me stability working in film, and led to other NGOs contacting me for work. For a few years I did tons of these videos, but it was never really what I wanted to do.
WYC: What would you say is the reason you had access to all of those connections once you were in Cambodia?
JO: Being a foreigner helped a lot. I was able to get away with printing business cards that said I was a filmmaker, and people believed me because I was a white dude in a button-down shirt. Phnom Penh is very small so you get to know everybody, and back in 2014 there were a lot of young journalists going to Cambodia to cut their teeth to work in newsrooms for the first time. They used to have a free press out there, newspapers that could report on things and not fear the government, which is no longer the case. I hung out with the journalists and filmmakers, and the circle was so small that eventually they needed someone to help them with a shoot or something.
WYC: Did you know this would be the case when your friend Cade suggested going there?
JO: I had no idea. I just knew that I was 23, 24, living in a Prius on Potrero Hill, between odd jobs working at a sex shop, Home Depot, Sunglass Hut, and an elementary school, I remember thinking quite clearly—I’m young enough that if I do something like this right now it could alter the course of my life forever, in a positive way. Getting into film or journalism didn’t even register as a possibility.
WYC: You started a production company in Phnom Penh, called Turren Films. How far into your time living there did you start your own company?
JO: It was two or three years in. I started it because I was pitching for jobs and messaging companies, and I didn’t want to have an @gmail email. I didn’t mean to start a company so much as I figured it would give some authenticity or credibility to email from a website domain. When we started doing commercial work and I would put the logo in the music videos, that’s when it really became more of a production company.
WYC: Did you incorporate in Cambodia?
JO: We were a very small company. Other people with small companies said you don’t really want to incorporate with the tax system there until you have at least 25 or 30 staff.
WYC: Throughout your time there, what kind of visas were you on?
JO: Cambodia has different types of visas for foreigners, including tourist (Type-T), business (Type-E), and what’s called an ordinary visa (Type-E). I was on the ordinary visa for the most part, which is for foreigners planning to stay in Cambodia for an extended period of time. [It’s initially valid for 30 days, but it can be extended indefinitely for periods of up to one year at a time.] You’re supposed to have a work permit and documentation, but every year I would just go to the travel agency and pay them an extra $50, which will get you the visa whether you have the paperwork or not.
WYC: They give anyone a visa if you pay them an extra $50 in addition to the visa fee?
JO: Yeah, which has risks. I have a friend, a journalist, who’s done everything above board since he first came to Cambodia. He’s always had a work permit, a press pass, registered as a journalist, all those things. He was banned from the country because he was reporting on stuff that the government didn’t like. In January he got stopped at the airport and deported. So, you can get away with it and do whatever you want, sort of, but if you piss off whoever then it doesn’t matter whether you’ve followed all the rules.
WYC: Did you ever feel like you were risking your status with this visa?
JO: Yeah, I did a number of documentary projects that I would not put my name on because it felt risky either for me or the people I was working with. The ethical rules that journalists hold themselves to are quite high, which almost is a cop out at the same time, to take our names off. I have a lot of respect for journalists, but I never considered myself one. The stories I left my name off of were published by platforms like VICE and Al Jazeera, so you know they had gone through enough verification and were not just publishing nonsense. But I definitely worried about even some of the commercial stuff that we did.
There’s plenty of examples where people just made silly videos for YouTube, and got called into the Ministry of Culture & Fine Arts as a result. Then they have to make a formal apology and it derails their careers because they’ve done something that doesn’t respect the culture of Cambodia, for whatever reason.
VannDa during shooting for the Skull 2 short film, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by Jeremiah Overman
WYC: Did the censorship landscape or the cultural landscape change over the ten years you were there?
JO: Absolutely. It’s always changing, it would sort of expand and contract every 5 years, which is when the elections are. I worked with this Cambodian artist named VannDa, he’s huge, like the Beatles. He’ll get calls from people at the top. When it comes to working on stuff that’s high profile like that, there’s a different level of censorship that people have to be conscious of, versus working with smaller, more punk rock artists where it doesn’t matter quite as much.
The absolute power is that censorship doesn’t need to be enforced to be enforced, right? People are so cautious and concerned about what might get censored that they do a far better job of censoring themselves than anyone else could ever do. That really bugged me out. It’s a bummer too, because Cambodia is a small country with so much creative energy.
Phnom Penh -> New York
WYC: What led you to move back to the US?
JO: On one hand, I had come back to visit my folks and it seemed like they were getting a lot older. I wanted to spend time with them and be closer to them. I spent ten years in Cambodia, went to every province, saw a lot of the country, and spent a lot of time with the people there. The first few years I was there, I really stuck with the other foreigners, but after four years this wasn’t the case for me. All of my friends were Cambodian, and I often found myself as the only foreigner on set for a project I was working on. My closest friends, the people I like and care about the most are Cambodian. I have a lot of love and respect for them.
I felt as well that I had plateaued in Cambodia and wasn’t growing as a filmmaker or photographer anymore. I wanted to come to the US and work with people who would challenge me in different ways.
WYC: What did that mean, to plateau?
JO: I had done high-profile projects and things I thought were really meaningful and well-received. But creatively I felt constricted by a lot of the censorship. As a foreigner I would want to push for an idea and people would be uncomfortable with it and not want to do it. And they could easily end this conversation with something like, “Well you’re a foreigner, this is Cambodia, you wouldn’t understand,” which there’s some truth to, and this is valid. Everyone in Cambodia wanted to be the first to try something new, but were really afraid to take the risk. So there’s this weird friction between wanting to do something new but also being afraid to fail at doing things for the first time. And that really grinds progress to a halt.
WYC: Do you feel like you were sometimes the one encouraging people in the community to push harder?
JO: Hell yeah, and I was just as much challenged by others I was working with who were also dissatisfied and wanted to make things.
WYC: Were your peers interested in leaving to go to other countries and expand their careers elsewhere?
JO: Some of them were, but it’s really fucking hard for the average Cambodian to get a visa to come to the US or work elsewhere. But I don’t think there’s this wish among most of my peers to be working elsewhere. They’ve obviously been through a lot in the last 40 years, and there’s a lot of catching up to do telling stories. From my understanding, through talking to my friends, a lot of people are frustrated, and it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm to keep working in the system. But people are passionate and care a lot about it. It’s a beautiful, frustrating place.
WYC: While you were in Cambodia, did you feel like you were cut off from what was going on in the US, or did you keep tabs on the news?
JO: I did sort of keep tabs, but I remember being at a dinner with all of my friends as the only American at the table. They’d be talking about American politics and look at me as if I could somehow make sense of this, and I’d be like—dude, I don’t fucking know. I got back to New York when the October 7th attacks happened in Israel, and there started to be a lot of pro-Palestine protests and pro-Israel protests. So I got a press pass in New York, downloaded Rumble and Truth Social and things like that. I would go out at night to these protests and come back and look at right-wing and left-wing social media and see how this thing that I had just walked away from was being talked about to help me make sense of everything else I had read and talked about over the last couple of years. I’m so confused by the US and it’s so hard to pin down. This is what I want to continue working on—to make sense of this and try to remember this.
WYC: Did being away for so long give you a stronger sense of interest in the US upon coming back?
JO: Yeah, Americans really think that they’re the center of the universe, like radical individualism. I think Americans are so hungry for community but they feel like they shouldn’t need it, that they should be able to do everything for themselves.
WYC: Do you have a sense of community in the US?
JO: I think in New York I do. New York is kind of a cheat code, where you can be incredibly lonely but still have a semblance of community even if you do want to isolate yourself. In New York you sort of feel like you fit in because everybody’s too busy to question whether or not you do.
WYC: Do you think you will stay in the US for the foreseeable future?
JO: When I came back last year, a friend I’ve known since elementary school pointed out that I have spent more years of my life in Phnom Penh than in any other city I’ve lived in. I think I want to go back to Cambodia. I’ve never been to Western Europe, or Australia, I want to go everywhere.
WYC: Has your sense of adventure grown over the years?
JO: I think so, to the consternation of those around me.