Jeongdan Choi is a film director and producer whose work explores the intersections of the humanities, society, and the arts through cinema and documentary filmmaking. A graduate of Korea University, where she studied English Literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, she has served as the Founder and Director of October Film Co., Ltd. since 2014, developing projects that transform intellectual inquiry and human experience into cinematic narratives.

Her most significant documentary work, In the Sea of Strange Thoughts, is the result of an extraordinary 21-year journey documenting the life and thought of Kim Woo-chang, one of Korea’s most distinguished intellectuals and humanists. Through this long-term cinematic portrait, Choi examines not only the ideas of a single thinker, but also the relationship between philosophy, history, culture, and the everyday experience of being human. The film has received international recognition at major film festivals, including the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, where it received both a Special Jury Mention and the Russian Documentary Film & Television Guild Award, as well as the Best Screenplay Award at the 13th Montreal Asian Film Festival.

Her work has been presented at numerous international and Korean film festivals, including the Wide Angle Documentary Competition at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, the 51st Seoul Independent Film Festival, the Documentary Competition of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, the 13th Montreal Asian Film Festival as its Closing Film, the 23rd Seoul International Agape Film Festival, the 13th Chuncheon Film Festival, the 26th Flahertiana International Documentary Film Festival, the Literature Film Festival presented by the Arts Council Korea and the Asia Culture Center, and the 21st Jeju Film Festival.

Choi is currently expanding her cinematic exploration toward artificial intelligence, mathematics, and the nature of human thought. She is producing Counterpoint of Intelligence – A Dialogue Between AI and a Mathematician in collaboration with internationally renowned mathematician Minhyong Kim, while also developing the international co-production project Why Don’t Russians Smile?, which explores cultural differences and the ways people perceive and interpret one another across societies. Through these projects, she continues to investigate the evolving relationship between human intelligence, technology, culture, and the deeper structures of thought.

Her broader career also includes serving as the Korean production agency for the Swedish documentary The Korean War and the Swedes in 2018. Earlier in her career, she appeared as the lead actress in the feature film Butterfly Mole (2008), which was selected as the opening film of the Critics’ Choice section at the Busan International Film Festival. Her contributions to culture and the arts have also been recognized with the 2025 ESG Grand Prize from the Korea ESG Association and the 2020 Proud College of Liberal Arts Alumni Award in the Culture and Arts category from Korea University.