For Baltasar Kormakur, an extreme route to the Oscar shortlist

Baltasar Kormakur has had one strange career. After starting out as an actor in his native Iceland in the mid-1990s, he soon added directing to his dossier. He began with small Icelandic-language slacker films like “101 Reykjavik,” segued to slightly bigger (but still pretty small) thrillers like “The Sea” and “Jar City” and eventually made the jump to English-language Hollywood flicks like the recent action hit “Contraband,” a remake of an Icelandic movie Kormakur starred in.

By Steven Zeitchik

January 5, 2013