"Fly, Penguin" and the Pain of Eating Out

20090914_yim

Movie Director and Korea Animal Rights Advocate Director, Yim Seung Rae (48), has made a soon-to-be released movie based on human rights issues called Fly, Penguin. The movie was produced by the National Human Rights Committee and Omnibus Movie last November. Yim chose to make this movie not out of a desire for fame, but to explore and depict current issues faced by Koreans.

In Fly, Penguin, current real life issues are featured, such as the loneliness of a“Goose Father,” the elementary student who detests going to learning institutes, the “Alpha Mom” whose whole life is devoted to her child’s education, the challenges facing a vegetarian/vegan woman who is also a smoker, and the struggles of a couple facing a divorce.

Fly, Penguin is Yim's 4th feature length movie and opens September 24, 2009, across the nation.

Looking back on Director Yim’s career, she has made many impressive movies, such as the award winning Waikiki Brothers, Mu Seng Soon, New Friend, Rules of Traveling Together with a Cow (a movie based on Kim Do Yun’s A Farmer Novelist).

One part of Fly, Penguin reflects on the problem of a vegetarian who is forced to join after-work male bonding “eat-out” sessions with his coworkers. It is an issue that Yim herself has often faced, as she is also a vegetarian.

Although she had once felt empathy and pity at seeing things like live crabs being put into boiling hot water to be cooked as food, Yim was not vegetarian. However, her eating habits changed one day when she happened to walk into a alley filled with “Dog Soju/Tonic” shops. She was so traumatized and shocked by what she saw that she became a vegetarian from then on. She has been a vegetarian for seven years and it brings her a peace of mind.

The thought of any dog, even pets, that could end up as food compelled her to campaign for animal rights and welfare. She join KARA and one of the first actions as KARA's Director was to lead a march through Insadong, Seoul, to campaign against dog meat consumption on the first hottest day of summer. She also attended a special Buddhist Prayer ceremony for all the suffering and slaughtered dogs on the last day of the hottest period of summer.

Having a strong interest in Buddhism, Yim traveled to Dalamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives, to attend his New Year’s Celebration speech.

When a city dweller in Seoul, Yim adopted three stray dogs. But needing a yard, she opted to move to Yang Pyeong for the sake of her pets. Now, she has a beautiful garden where flowers bloom in season and vegetables grow. She says that thanks to her dogs, she lives in a much better environment and has benefited greatly from it.

Director Profile Menu

Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a re-adjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called “The Golden Rule” beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.

Thomas Hardy

They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston

The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?

Jeremy Bentham

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Henry David Thoreau

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.

Alice Walker

As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

Pythagoras

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

Theodor Adorno

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

William Ralph Inge

In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

Peter Singer

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

Leo Tolstoy

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Mahatma Gandhi

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Thomas Edison

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

George Bernard Shaw

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

Charles Darwin

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein