After magnificently closing the Venice Festival, J. A. Bayona now brings to the Perlak section of San Sebastian La sociedad de la nieve, a Netflix blockbuster about the 1972 Andes air tragedy that has been chosen by the Academy of Cinema for to represent Spain at the next edition of the Oscars. It does not yet have a release date on the platform, but it will arrive in cinemas earlier. Unlike Viuen (Frank Marshall, 1993), the film does not focus only on recreating the accident, but dives into the psychology of the 16 young survivors who were rescued after 72 days of agony, as well as the of those who never returned from the mountain.
It is a project based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, which collects the testimonies of those who managed to get out alive, in which Bayona has been involved for ten years and which represents the return to Spanish sixteen years after The Orphanage (2007), his acclaimed first work. “For me it was a test to shoot again at home with my team and, also, as we shot it, it was a film in which I tested myself in many things”, he comments with this newspaper.
Vierci’s book came to him while he was documenting for The Impossible. “I thought it was a story I knew, and the scope of the book is much greater than the facts. Viuen is about what happened, while La sociedad de la nieve is about what happened to them”, he clarifies. The author of A monster comes to see me saw it as interesting for the viewer to experience the process that the survivors went through. “The actors had almost 140 days to experiment and we had the luxury of having the help of the survivors and the families of the dead.” Bayona set out to make a chronological journey from the beginning to the end and was mainly interested in finding “the images, the moments in which the truth was confused with the story”, to create a shocking work that unites spectacle and emotion in equal parts . “The survivors had the need for another film to be made, as if by telling this story they would be healed in some way”, he points out.
In popular memory, people associate the tragedy with cannibalism, as in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet the survivors were forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive. The director avoids the morbid component with a subtle staging. “They blocked in their heads what they were doing. They made it routine what is rough, but it is difficult for the public to see the rough as an anecdotal fact and to achieve that feeling was very difficult. Finally, we chose to suggest rather than show.” And he adds: “When you close Vierci’s book, it is not the subject that you stay with”.
After participating in the Jurassic World saga and in the first two episodes of the Lord of the Rings series, with a “very rigid” production system, Bayona says that “I needed freedom, and this was very noticeable in the first days of filming , that we tried things, with many rehearsals”. Regarding the use of artificial intelligence, he believes that “what is dangerous is not the tool but the use that is made of it. In Hollywood, we’ve been seeing movies written according to a pattern for many years, but when you break the mold and create something truly innovative and soulful, you smash the box office.”
Fingernails, in which the Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou reflects on the obsession with finding true love in a world of retro aesthetics, was already in the official competition section. A half orange with which the affinity is calculated with a compatibility test that detects the percentage of affinity of the couple. And all this is extracted through the nails of the fingers of the hand. According to Nikou, it is a “comic allegory” that hides “a critical reflection against new technologies”. The film, which will be seen on the Apple TV platform on October 27, stars Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed and has the support of Cate Blanchett in the production.
