The Uruguayan journalist and writer Pablo Vierci (Montevideo, 1950) is the author of The Snow Society (Alrevés), the book that more than a decade ago moved J.A. Bayona that permeated the filming of his film The Impossible. Not only that. In 2011, Bayona wrote a powerful, profound letter to Vierci about the book, which he shared with the survivors of the terrible plane crash in the Andes in 1972, some of whom had been his schoolmates. Everyone was shocked. With time, Bayona would manage with great determination to bring The Snow Society to the screen and sweep the Goya awards last Saturday, which Vierci attended, who is now presenting in Madrid his work with interviews with the survivors, woven so finely that It’s quite a life lesson. “My antidote,” as he admits.
How have you felt about the barrage of the Goyas?
Without false humility or arrogance, I imagined we would win the majority. I consider that in this film the story comes together with the enormous achievement of Bayona and forms an intergalactic rocket. Don’t take this as arrogant, I think the film plays in a different league. It is an experience, a psychological, emotional journey, and I don’t see movies that play in that league today. Right now, viewers are looking for that league, deeper experiences, beyond entertainment. Depth flashes.
Precisely, Bayona, in the letter he sent to you in 2011 as an introduction, tells you that he believes that “the naked heart where the human being gives himself to the other” has not really been brought to film.
In the letter he quotes two survivors, Fito Strauch, who says that they learned that when a man is stripped of everything, a generous being emerges, and Roberto Canessa, when he speaks to those who did not return and asks them to “allow Let us live on behalf of you.” If we add the letter he writes to the mule driver who rescues them, Nando Parrado, who was my classmate, we have been friends since we were five years old, in which he says that “I come from a plane that fell in the mountains, I am Uruguayan, on the plane There are 14 injured,” if you take those two cards, you have the movie. Jota’s letter was like a transatlantic meteorite. He sent it to me and I shared it with the living survivors in 2011. Out of the blue it came to us when we had other offers to do series. This person emerged who penetrated so deeply without ever having seen our faces. And everyone understood that this person had the courage and emotional caliber to dive into the deep waters.
You reflect on how, unlike Hobbes’ idea of ??man being a wolf to man, in this accident there is no apocalyptic pack or every man for himself. They help each other. How do you explain it?
Because it is not fiction. Hobbes speculates, Lord of the Flies is a fiction. This is nonfiction. And there are no enemies. I’m not saying that the same thing will always happen, but here is a resounding example where the man lost, abandoned, in the middle of the cosmos, because I was in that place and Jota was in that place and it is not Sierra Nevada, it is not Europe, It is infinity, you are on Mars, it turns out that alone and abandoned in the worst place imaginable, what arises is compassion. In the letter written by one of the boys who died, Gustavo Nicolich, he says, because of the pact of mutual surrender, that although it may seem like a lie, because it seems that we are just a body, if the day came that I had to hand him over, I would gladly do so. They are on another plane of consciousness.
That’s much truer than apocalyptic fictions, like Mad Max. I have an antidote and I have used it since I was 22 years old. An optimistic vision. And the film reaffirms it with new tools. It would not have been easy, I think, a long time ago to put it from the point of view of one of those who did not return. The scoop with which we start with Bayona is that there are 16 alive because there are 29 dead. They had been left in the shadows, but they are an unavoidable part of the departure of the 16. The case of the one narrated is the most extreme example of surrender. Everyone said that you had to give everything, but keep something for yourself, the essential energy to live tomorrow. He didn’t know how to speculate, his brother told me.
He says that in those 72 days a society was created in the snow with totally different rules than those on the plain. Did it help that they were a team?
Did it help that they were Uruguayan? They were, all 45 of them. We talked a lot with Jota Bayona and he wanted to get to know our society. It is a small society, of 3,400,000, very balanced, very egalitarian, the first social democracy in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, egalitarian, public, secular and free education since 1876. We have been republicans since 1813. In the fifties and sixties, When we grew up in Uruguay, there was no president of the Republic, there was a utopia that went wrong, there were nine people, six from the majority and three from the minority, and they took turns for a year each. There was no president of the Republic but of the National Government Council. When there was a first president, when I was 18 years old, three before the accident, I was scared, won’t this person feel emboldened? And they all grew up in that world.
Does it matter that it was a team? I think so. Does it matter that we were from that school where integrity was preached more than academics? I think so. Irish brothers who did not know a word of Spanish and used rugby as a pedagogical tool. What they prioritized throughout my education was not academics, it was integrity, nobility. The other was adjective.
What were the rules of the snow society, so different from that of the plain?
Daniel Fernández Strauch says that “we were never better people than in the mountains.” It is colored by the entire pact of mutual surrender: instead of focusing on the fact that some kids feed on the bodies of the dead, you focus on the fact that I offer you the body in case I die so that you can continue living, I am a survivor and fuel at the same time. Those are the elements, the constitution. The first thing they worry about is the injured, it is the priority. You don’t go from one society to another suddenly, but when you hear on the radio that they won’t come looking for you, the umbilical cord ends and a new society is built based on mercy, compassion, solidarity and courage.
Uruguay as a country is a wedge. We were Spanish, English, Spaniards, Buenos Aires, Portuguese, Brazilians and we always wanted to be different and we never gave up. That example of not giving up is part of the country’s DNA. And the boys do not give up in an almost infinite succession of adversities. The most interesting thing is that he arrives at his destination and is saved and Nando gets on a helicopter to go look for his companions. There is a sense of brotherhood that is not current, because it is one of the most risky rescues in the history of aviation. And he doesn’t hesitate.
He says that this snow society is impregnated with them when they leave.
Roberto Canessa is a doctor. He is not dedicated to curing old people or rich men but rather children with congenital heart defects who are hopeless. They have the syndrome that no one came to rescue them, they had to rescue themselves.
He talks about society’s guilt for having stopped looking for them and headlines were even published when they learned that they ate human flesh asking “May God forgive them.”
That headline is from the early days. They rescue them and the rescuers see what happened. The bones, the remains. They didn’t mean to lie. They had gotten out of the habit of lying. Lies are also trained. In the early days, plains society condemned them. Five days later, they, and I was in that gym, explained what they experienced. And society stops condemning them. He absolves them. The father of the second to last to die, Arthur, the one who speaks of the God of the mountain, writes a letter saying that we should treat them as heroes, they exemplify the best in us. Society had not been able to empathize until they told it. They moved society forward. They allow us to think that human beings are much better than we believe in the century of the two world wars, the atomic bomb.
Is that group work a lesson for today?
The pandemic for me was a great tragedy, those two years where we saw death so close. The conviction that either we would be saved together or we would die separately, the frantic search all together for the light at the end of the tunnel, strengthened all of this. We saw ourselves vulnerable, faced with absolute uncertainty. On another scale, here are 45 abandoned people, declared dead, who do not give up and hand over their bodies so that others can continue in that race of witnesses that continues to this day. It speaks very well to us about human beings.
Coincidentally, during the filming, incredibly difficult, two months in Barcelona and four in Sierra Nevada, which was in the middle of the pandemic, we started with Jota and the infected actors. And a blizzard came and we had to abandon the hangar, which was a gigantic ephemeral construction and there was the feeling that we could literally fall. I wasn’t sure he was coming back. And that brought us closer in part to what happened in ’72. Jota knew that this story had to be done with courage and to the limit.
After so many years of knowing him and working together, what is Jota like?
Jota is dazzlingly good. And I believe that kindness is pure intelligence, so he is dazzlingly intelligent. And he is a Renaissance man, I jokingly call him Leonardo Da Vinci, a polymath, an expert in so many disciplines, so good at music, framing, narration… And he puts kindness and passion into everything. I do what I’m told.
What was the meeting like between the actors and the survivors, which you describe as overwhelming?
Some of the actors began to speak and it seemed that some of those who were not there, those who had remained on the mountain, began to speak. And when they talked it was so exciting… he was a guy who had been dead for 45 years. There was a symbiosis, linked to the fact that all this is very extreme, between life and death. At a certain point, and I hadn’t drank alcohol because I had to drive, I didn’t know who was who, I got confused about the names. This is the boy who is not here, he died 48 years ago, but I call him by his name. A symbiosis was formed, not a confusion. Confusion is when you know it is a mistake, symbiosis is when you no longer know if it is a mistake.
By the way, what did you think of ¡Vive!?
A very good film for the time. The book was a very good chronicle that was essential for the time because the true story had to be told, falsifications had been created and any nonsense was told, such as that the avalanche had not occurred or that they had delayed the departure to become famous. But the book came out too soon. And the film approached it from afar, “in a South American country,” they said. We have done it now from closeness, almost from within, asking ourselves the questions that twenty-somethings asked themselves 52 years ago.
He says the boys experienced deep spirituality.
After that, a war seems much more exotic and incomprehensible to you. So inhuman. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said that the hominid becomes Homo sapiens when the first fractured and welded femur is found in archaeology. Because the other femurs that were fractured were not healed because they died. That one received care. This is the fractured and welded femur of the 20th century, of contemporary times.
