Under the Lamp: The Nearest Darkness
Participating Students
- Hojung Kim (The Governor’s Academy)
- Jinho Lee (The Hill School)
- Rina Kook (Phillips Exeter Academy)
- Byungyoon Park (Winchester College)
About the Film
Four students from different schools came together to explore a question hidden in plain sight: how can young people live among us and yet remain unseen?
Under the Lamp: The Nearest Darkness looks at the human rights and experiences of North Korean-background youth. They live close to us, but most people never see them. Each of us came at the subject through our own dreams and interests, so the film shows several sides of the same overlooked reality.
There is a Korean saying: “It is darkest under the lamp.” A lamp lights up everything around it, but the spot right underneath stays dark. We used that to describe North Korean refugee youth, who live near us and still go unseen. The film opens with images of light seen from space and builds on the proverb. Many people think of North Korean human rights as a distant, overwhelming problem. But North Korean-background youth already living among us deal with unequal education, language barriers, identity struggles, and invisibility, and most people never notice.
We told four stories of light, one for each of the four rights these youth need most.
The Right to Learn, by Jinho Lee (The Hill School). Jinho dreams of becoming an astronomer. He points out that people under the same sky and the same stars don’t always get the same chance to learn. He looks at the educational challenges children face inside North Korea, and at the language and academic barriers facing North Korean-background youth and children born in third countries after resettlement. His argument is that every child deserves the chance to discover, pursue, and shape their dreams through education.
The Right to Belong, by Rina Kook (Phillips Exeter Academy). Rina, an aspiring artist, knows what it feels like to be an outsider in both the United States and Korea. Many North Korean-background youth say they haven’t directly experienced discrimination, yet they feel they have to hide where they come from and their family histories. The film argues that they don’t need sympathy. They need to be able to live openly and confidently as equal members of society.
The Right to Be Recorded, by Hojung Kim (The Governor’s Academy). I work behind the scenes in theater and production. Audiences remember the performers standing in the spotlight, while the names of the people backstage are often forgotten, and that shaped how I approached this project. North Korean-background youth are often shown through simple stories of hardship or “successful resettlement,” but those stories capture only a fraction of their experiences, and countless voices, struggles, and identities disappear from the public record. My segment asks whose stories are remembered, and whose are allowed to fade. A life that is never recorded can easily become a life that is never remembered. Invisibility is not always an accident. Sometimes it is built into the systems that decide which stories society values and preserves. Every young person deserves not only to be seen, but to have their story recognized, documented, and remembered.
The Right to Be Connected, by Byungyoon Park (Winchester College). Byungyoon is an aspiring physicist who developed a device that carries natural light into dark spaces. He ties it to the idea of delivering social opportunity: just as the device brings existing light inside, society has to bring education, information, relationships, and support to the young people who need them most. For him, every young person has the right to take part in society without being isolated.
Closing
Those were four stories and four fundamental rights: the Right to Learn, the Right to Belong, the Right to Be Recorded, and the Right to Be Connected. We didn’t want to show North Korean-background youth only through hardship or inspiring success stories. We wanted audiences to see them as individuals with their own dreams, identities, voices, and futures.
The light was there all along. We focused on the spotlight and overlooked the darkness closest to us. We hope the small light we shared helps illuminate what too often goes unseen. It’s time to see these young people not as statistics or symbols, but as individuals whose dignity, stories, and futures matter.
This interview was conducted with a North Korean defector who graduated from a university in South Korea. He talked about the differences between the education systems of North and South Korea, drawing on his own experience of studying in both places.
His account connects directly to the questions our film asks about who gets the chance to learn. Hearing it from someone who lived through both systems gave us a firsthand view that statistics and news reports rarely offer.
This is an interview with Professor Soo-Jeong Lee, a professor of cultural anthropology who conducts research on North Korean society. Her work looks at how people live, and how their communities and customs are shaped, which gives her a close understanding of North Korean defectors beyond what headlines usually show.
In our conversation, she focused primarily on sharing stories about the human rights of North Korean defectors. Her stories gave me a clearer picture of the people behind the issue, and they fit the questions we were exploring in our film about who is seen, who is heard, and who is left in the dark.
2026 Youth Human Rights Video Contest
Jury Excellence Award, Second Prize
October 6, 2026
Under the Lamp: The Nearest Darkness received Second Prize in the Jury Excellence Award category of the 2026 Youth Human Rights Video Contest, hosted by the Youth Forum for North Korea Democratization (YFNKD). The contest’s top prize is the Republic of Korea (ROK) Minister of Unification Award. Entries were selected by an expert jury in journalism and academia, with final review by the ROK Ministry of Unification.