Every year, on the 2nd Thursday of November, the entire country of South-Korea is put to the test. That day, more than half a million senior high school students take part in the National Exam, better known as suneung siheom in Korean. Suneung isn’t a regular high school test. The test will not only determine where the high school seniors will attend university but ultimately also their status in the Korean hierarchical society. At the most prestigious universities, spaces for freshmen are very limited, with chances of acceptance being one in a hundred (or less). Getting into a university with a good reputation is one of the most competitive experiences Korean students will ever experience in their life.‘Reach for the SKY’ is a documentary about a society where education has become a multi-billion industry because of its obsessions with achievement and status; about a culture where education has become as important as the type of car you drive or the size of your apartment; where mothers have become the educational agents of their children, micro-managing every hour that could be spent on studying. In our story, we follow several high-school seniors, their families and teachers in the preparations and build-up to the National Exam, as well as its aftermath. Their personal stories not only reflect what it means to be a teenager in South-Korea but ultimately raise questions about the way we learn and more importantly: Why? Because at its core, ‘Reach for the SKY’ is a film about the right of every child to play and self-develop. After many years of intense studying, many teenagers are emotionally spent. One day they wake up, happy to learn they have been accepted to the university they wanted to get in to so badly. They are confronted with the realization that they didn’t really know what they were studying for. For these students, reaching for the sky wasn’t so much a future dream, but merely a test score on a university application letter.