On March 11, we will know if La sociedad de la nieve, nominated for the Oscar for best international film and also for best make-up and hairdressing, wins both awards. I think he deserves them, as he deserved the twelve Goyas last February, among other awards. The extraordinary performance of the actors who play the boys of the Uruguayan rugby team, who were going to play a match in Santiago de Chile, the magnificent special effects, the make-up, etc., allow us to observe the tragedy as if we were really there living The turbulence of the plane, which will eventually crash, leads us to cling to the seat of the cinema, as if we were to be catapulted out into the fear of the unknown, and then to feel ourselves partakers of the enormous hardships of the survivors
The snow society is based on the book of the same title by the Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci, a schoolmate of some of the protagonists of the tragedy, who wanted to investigate how it happened, what happened during the seventies two days that the survivors remained isolated and what it meant to have to decide whether to let themselves die of starvation or subsist by eating the flesh of those who were dying, friends and even family, in an era when organ donation, which we are used to today, was almost non-existent, which made it even more truculent to feed on corpses.
Vierci already dedicated, prior to his bestseller, another book to his friend Roberto Calasso, who, with Nando Parrado – who also left a written testimony in Milagro en los Andes of his colossal adventure -, walked for ten days until finding the help that could save his companions.
In La sociedad de la neu, published in 2008 and republished with a new prologue in 2022, fifty years after the accident, Pablo Vierci collects the memories of not just one but all the survivors. His collaboration with Bayona on the film and his assistance on the set were key in conveying to the great director, the crew and the young actors the contained emotion and poetic halo that the film offers .
The snow society also raises questions of enormous interest which, in a world as individualistic as ours, lead us to ask ourselves how we would have behaved in similar circumstances, how we would have reacted and how we would have faced the situation that the survivors go through. There is, in addition, a primordial aspect that I have no doubt is transmuted from the reality lived during the isolation on the peaks of the Andes. I mean the organization of this society imposed by the snow, in the middle of nowhere, in a hostile environment, surrounded by avalanches and icy wind, enveloped in a silence of infinite whiteness, especially from the moment when , after ten days of resistance, they hear on the radio that their search is being abandoned.
It is from then that society truly emerges, which, as defined by the DIEC, is a “permanent gathering of people who live according to common values ??and under common laws”. In that case the primary value was the survival of all and this entails and implies the need to exercise mutual aid, the most altruistic interrelation because only solidarity allowed them to subsist. “We have never been better people than in the mountains,” Daniel Fernández Strauch, one of the survivors, told Vierci.
Hopefully his example down here will make us better too.