On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, contracted to take a rugby team to Chile, crashed into a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Of the 45 passengers, only 16 survived. Young men of just 20 years old, trapped in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet, were forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive. The ordeal lasted 72 eternal days, until on December 23 they were finally rescued. The accident shocked the whole world and had a huge media impact. Books were written and films were made about it, such as Viuen (1993), by Frank Marshall, with Ethan Hawke in the role of Nando Parrado, one of the boys who, accompanied by Roberto Canessa, walked exhausted about 38 kilometers for ten days until finding the Chilean porter Sergio Catalán, who spread the word of alarm. Half a century after the events, Juan Antonio Bayona, Jota, has transferred his very personal vision of the epic to La sociedad de la nieve, a Netflix original film that arrives in theaters today and that on January 4 will reach the platform The work, which confirms the Barcelona native’s maturity as a filmmaker, his narrative mastery and his obsessive search for perfection in a perfect combination of spectacle and emotion, has 13 nominations for the Goya Awards, opts for the Golden Globe as best non-English language film and is Spain’s bid for the Oscars. On December 21, it will be known if it will be among the 15 preselected.
The story is based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, a friend of the survivors, who recounted the testimonies in a striking narrative that exposes leadership and the ability to overcome as keys to surviving at four thousand meters, without shelter or food, and facing nighttime temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero. The project started dancing in Bayona’s head more than a decade ago, during the filming of The Impossible, a film that opened the doors to Hollywood. “I bought a few books to document myself on survival, such as La sociedad de la nieve, and I was so fascinated that on set I would read excerpts to the actors so that they understood things that were analogous. In fact, at the end of Lo imposible there is the essence of the complexity of Vierci’s work”, comments Bayona to a group of journalists who went to the filming of the mastodontic production in Sierra Nevada. A site with three aircraft built to real scale and 300 people working in three units that spread to Montevideo and different locations in the Andes, both in Chile and Argentina, including the Valley of Tears, a real location where pass the tragedy
Produced by Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida, it is Bayona’s first film in Spanish, after 14 years of shooting in English, and gives the director of L’orfenat a degree of “greater freedom”. The Uruguayan writer, who published the book in 2009, remembers Jota’s first phone conversation with one of the survivors: “Suddenly they both became emotional, and this was transmitted to the rest of the group. It was the first conclusive data that the survivors would put their trust and faith in Bayona, which is very difficult for them”. The director reveals that he likes “great cinema, the one that moves you and leaves you silent at the end of the screening, and Vierci’s book leaves you with many questions”. And he adds: “When a person approaches a real story, he must find what transcends the anecdote so that the story is universal”, as he already achieved with the survival story of María Belón and her family in the tsunami in Thailand that he narrated The impossible
Regarding the current validity of the story, Bayona answers: “This story activates the fact of knowing your nature and being able to accept it in the face of the demands of society. Basically, it’s a fascinating story of love and infinite dedication”, he says about events “in which one has a very extreme, complex and contradictory view of life”. On his side, Vierci affirms that “anthropophagy back then obscured everything, because there were no organ donations or transplants. What they built was a counterintuitive society in the face of adversity, and instead of the human beast emerging from the field who can, they achieved the opposite. The priority was to attend to the wounded, to hand over the body for fuel. It is not a purer or better society, but it raises an alternative in an extreme society. What happens when adversities follow one another in a vertiginous and excessive manner?”, he asks. In fact, what emerged in that hell “was affection and respect for life and death”.
Bayona says that they have made a lot of effort to “recreate the truth of what happened”, since “we have all the data to be able to explain it and we have tried to get all the seven as close as possible to the reality that they lived , with the idea of ??explaining how a catastrophe like this extracts in some way your own nature and if a person is able to break with the culture he already brings from home”.
For the vast majority of Uruguayan and Argentinian actors who appear in the film, it is their first feature film. They rehearsed with Bayona for two months in a ship in Badalona, ??and the worst thing they brought was the personalized diet to stage the hardest moments. “I weighed 96 kilos and now I weigh 78,” says Agustín Berruti, the benjamin of the cast, who plays Bobby Françoise, and, like him, comes from a rural background. “I had never been by plane,” says this actor from Tacuarembó with a broad smile. Felipe González Otaño, who gives life to Carlitos Páez, comments that “Bayona is demanding, a fact that helps to enhance his work. He has been very generous with us in the preparation stage and has given us freedom to improvise and rethink scenes. Without a level of physical and mental demand, it is impossible to reach history, and you can see the results”. After the tragedy, some survivors chose to hold conferences and others preferred not to talk about the subject again. “One of the richest things about the story is that it talks about a group with different points of view, and what both the film and the book propose is to understand this story from this plurality of voices,” says Valentino Alonso, alter ego of Pancho Delgado. Rafael Federman, who plays Eduardo Strauch, believes that, since they had the opportunity to meet them in person in Montevideo, they are aware that, “despite their differences, an invisible, deep and unique bond unites them”. “It’s a tribute to those who returned and those who didn’t,” adds Berruti.
For Andy Pruss, who plays Roy Harley, “with their differences, together they managed to save themselves from something that was unimaginable”. Agustín Pardella, who puts himself in Parrado’s shoes, says that he has not been able to meet in person who was the leader of the group. “We spoke by video call, but in general it has been essential to spend time with the survivors.” There are those who have watched Viuen, but their acting advisor preferred that they not have it in mind. ” They live and explain what happened, and this film wants to explain what happened to them. It’s not a story of heroism,” says Federman. “If this film traced the facts, La sociedad de la nieve is a maturation of the experience narrated with a more spiritual meaning”, concludes Luciano Chatton, Pedro Algorta’s interpreter.
