General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Samaritan Girl (사마리아)

Samaritan Girl (사마리아; original title Samaria) is a 2004 South Korean drama film written, directed, and edited by Kim Ki-duk about two teenage girls who enter prostitution to fund a trip to Europe, and the girl's police-detective father who discovers what she has been doing.¹ It won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 54th Berlin International Film Festival, the first time a Korean director received that award.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Samaria (사마리아), South Korea, 2004¹
Director	Kim Ki-duk (also writer and editor); his tenth feature¹^•⁴
Runtime / format	95 minutes, 35 mm, Korean language¹
Main cast	Kwak Ji-min (Yeo-jin), Seo Min-jung (Jae-young), Lee Eol (the father, Yeong-ki)⁵
Major award	Silver Bear for Best Director, 54th Berlinale (2004)²
South Korean release	March 5, 2004; 172,000 admissions⁶
Structure	Three parts titled Vasumitra, Samaria, and Sonata⁷

Spoilers

Plot

The two central characters are high school friends Yeo-jin and Jae-young, who are saving money for a trip to Europe. Jae-young works after school as a prostitute, favoring older clients, while Yeo-jin acts as her manager: she arranges appointments through chatrooms, instant messaging, and mobile phones, handles the money, and stands guard.¹^•⁸

During a police raid on a motel, Jae-young jumps from a window to escape and is fatally injured, dying in front of Yeo-jin.¹^•⁹ Consumed by guilt, Yeo-jin takes over her friend's role: she seeks out each of Jae-young's former clients, sleeps with them, and returns the money they had paid.¹ When her father, a police detective, accidentally discovers her activities, the tone hardens: he begins a personal campaign against his daughter's customers, and in Time Out's account eventually kills one of the men in rage.¹^•¹⁰

Structure and religious references

Kim described the film as three parts. In "Vasumitra," Jae-young, who does not treat the work as a business, is the focus; in "Samaria," Yeo-jin enters prostitution after Jae-young's death; and in "Sonata," the story centers on the father who witnesses his daughter's encounters.⁷

The film draws on two religious sources. Jae-young identifies with Vasumitra, a legendary Indian prostitute whose clients converted to Buddhism after being with her, and the title invokes the Christian parable of the good Samaritan.¹^•¹⁰ The Karlovy Vary festival program called the film "a mixture of Buddhist teaching and Catholic guilt and redemption," while noting that it is anything but religious or moralistic, leaving the viewer to judge.¹¹^•¹ Kim himself said in a 2004 interview that the apparent Catholicism was only appearance, that the film is not about religion, and that he wanted to portray the feelings of a father whose daughter engages in compensated dating.¹²^•¹³

Production and release

The film was produced by Kim Ki-duk Film with Cineclick Asia as world sales agent, shot on 35 mm by cinematographer Sun Sang-jae, with music by Park Ji-woong.¹^•² Accounts of the shoot differ: the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that Kim finished the entire shoot in 15 days, while SBS reported 11 days of filming on a production budget of about 500 million won, small beside the contemporaneous big-budget Korean productions.¹⁴^•¹³

It was invited to the official competition of the 54th Berlin International Film Festival, whose organizers reportedly extended the submission deadline for the film by more than a month.¹⁵ There Kim won the Silver Bear for Best Director; the Golden Bear that year went to Fatih Akin's Head-On.³^•¹⁶ With Im Kwon-taek's award at Cannes and Lee Chang-dong's at Venice, both in 2002, the win meant Korean directors had taken the directing prize at all three major European festivals within two years.¹⁷

Released in South Korea on March 5, 2004, rated 18+, the film sold 172,000 admissions, a modest commercial result compared with the blockbusters of that season.⁶ It later screened at festivals including Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Melbourne, and MoMA's 2008 retrospective of Kim's work.¹¹^•¹^•⁴^•¹⁸

Reception

Critical response was divided. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 50% Tomatometer from 8 critics and a 75% audience score.¹⁹ Variety's Derek Elley wrote that Kim maintained "a more mature, assured outlook" with his tenth feature, treating his forceful material in a calmer, more transcendent way than in Bad Guy (2001).²⁰ Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader gave it 0 of 4 stars, calling its early parts puritanical and pornographic illustrations of an obnoxious male fantasy, and Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine called it an under-thought formula linking sex, youth, and violence.¹⁹ Time Out was similarly hostile, calling it a ludicrous melodrama that sanitizes, glamorizes, and deplores teenage prostitution at once.¹⁰

Korean critics also debated the film. A Cine21 relay review by film critic Jeong Seong-il argued that Kim wisely avoided filming the sex trade itself, and read the title against the parable of the good Samaritan and the woman taken in adultery in John 8:7.²¹ A feminist debate in the same magazine followed; columnist Hwang Jin-mi argued the film is not simply a story of a father who avenges and forgives, but one that overturns common assumptions about teenage prostitution while leaving the father's unilateral moral judgment grotesquely exposed.²² Some critics criticized Kim's portrayal of women as either saint or whore, while others read the film as an indictment of a society that abandons its young.²³

The film is generally seen as a transition in Kim's career, combining the darker themes of his earlier work such as Bad Guy with the calmer sensibility of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003), and it is counted among his more accessible films.⁴^•¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026