On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to take a rugby team to Chile, crashed into a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Of its 45 passengers, only 16 survived. Some kids of barely 20 years old who were 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 December 23 when they were finally rescued.
The accident shocked the entire world and had a brutal media impact. Books were written and movies were made such as ¡Viven! (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 km for 10 days until they found the Chilean muleteer Sergio Catalán, who provided the voice. alarm.
Half a century after the events, Juan Antonio 'Jota' Bayona has expressed his very personal vision of the epic in The Snow Society, a Netflix original film that hits theaters today and will arrive on the platform on January 4. 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 Goya nominations and is up for the Golden Globe for best non-language film. English, and it is Spain's bet for the Oscars. On December 21, it will be known if it is among the 15 shortlisted.
The story is based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, a friend of the survivors, who recounted their testimonies in an overwhelming narrative that exposes leadership and the ability to overcome as keys to surviving at four thousand meters high, without shelter or food. and facing night temperatures of up to 40 degrees below zero.
The project began to be on Bayona's mind more than a decade ago, during the filming of The Impossible, a film that opened the doors to Hollywood. “I bought several books to document survival, among them The Snow Society, and I was so fascinated that on the set I read fragments to the actors so that they understood things that were analogous and in fact at the end of The Impossible is the essence of the complexity of Vierci's work," Bayona comments to a group of journalists who attended the filming of the mammoth production in Sierra Nevada. A site with three full-scale airplanes and three hundred people working in three units that extended to Montevideo and several locations in the Andes, both in Chile and Argentina, including the Valley of Tears, the real location where the tragedy occurred.
Produced by Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida, it is the first that Bayona has made in Spanish after 14 years filming in English and grants the director of El orfanato a degree of “greater freedom.” The Uruguayan writer, who published the book in 2009, remembers Jota's first telephone conversation with one of the survivors “Suddenly they both became excited and that was transferred to the rest of the group. That was the first conclusive piece of information that the survivors were going to put their trust and faith in Bayonne, something that is very difficult for them.”
The director confesses that he likes “great cinema, the one that moves you and leaves you in silence at the end of the screening and Vierci's book leaves you wondering many things.” And he adds: “When you approach a true story you have to find that which transcends the anecdote so that the story is universal”, as was already achieved with the survival story of María Belón and her family in the Thailand tsunami that she narrated in The Impossible. .
Questioned about the current validity of the story, Bayona responds: “This story activates knowing your own nature and being able to accept it in the face of the demands of society. At its core, it is a fascinating story of love and infinite dedication,” he says about some events “where one has a very extreme, complex and contradictory vision of life.”
At his side, Vierci maintains that “anthropophagy at that time overshadowed everything because organ donation and transplants did not exist. What they built was a counterintuitive society in the face of adversity and instead of the human beast of every man for himself emerging, they achieved the opposite. The priority was to care for the wounded, to deliver the body itself so that it could be fuel. It is not a purer or better society but it presents an alternative in an extreme society. What happens when adversities happen in a dizzying and disproportionate way? ”He asks himself. And what emerged in that hell “was affection, respect for life and death.”
Bayona says that they have made a great effort to “recreate the truth of what happened” since “we have all the data to be able to tell it and we have tried to make all the sets as close as possible to the reality that they lived with the idea of explaining how "A catastrophe like this somehow extracts your own nature and if one is capable of breaking with the culture that one brings from home."
For the vast majority of Uruguayan and Argentine actors who appear in the film, this is their first feature film. They rehearsed for two months in a warehouse in Badalona and what they had the worst was the personalized diet to stage the hardest moments. “I weighed 96 kilos and now I'm 78,” says Agustín Berruti, the youngest of the cast, who plays Bobby Françoise and, like him, comes from a rural background. “I had never traveled by plane before,” says this actor from Tacuarembó with a broad smile.
Felipe González Otaño, who plays Carlitos Páez, comments that “Bayona is demanding, which helps 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 the fruits are seen.” After the tragedy, some survivors chose to give lectures and others preferred not to speak about the subject again.
“One of the richest things about history is that it talks about a group with diverse 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, Pancho's alter ego. Slim. 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, they are united by an invisible, deep and unique bond." “It is a tribute to those who returned and those who did not return,” adds Berruti.
For Andy Pruss, who plays Roy Harley, “with their differences they all managed to save themselves from something that was unimaginable.” Agustín Pardella, who puts himself in Parrado's shoes, assures that he has not been able to meet the former leader of the group in person. “We have spoken via video call, but overall it has been essential to spend time with the survivors.” Some had seen ¡Vive! but her acting coach preferred not to have her present. " They live! tells what happened and this film wants to tell what happened to them. “It is not a story of heroism,” says Federman. “While they live! traces the facts, The Snow Society is a maturation of the experience narrated with a more spiritual sense,” concludes Luciano Chatton, Pedro Algorta's interpreter.
