Women Add to Diversity of Oscar Int’l Film Shortlist
The Mole Agent”), Agnieszka Holland (Czech Republic’s “Charlatan”), Maria Sødahl (Norway’s “Hope”) and Kaouther Ben Hania (Tunisia’s “The Man Who Sold His Skin”) — have little obviously in common, ranging as they do from long-lauded veterans to a rising talent enjoying her first major international breakout. Their films run the gamut from hybrid documentary to semi-autobiographical fiction to wild, high-concept satire — bound by intense, often socially conscious empathy for the complicated subjects at hand, with little in the way of sentimentality.Sødahl’s film, her second feature and her first in a decade, is the most intimate and domestically focused of the five, though that approach still permits plenty of surprises.