In a church in Montevideo a priest quotes from Matthew 4:4, his voice trailing off with the words: “Man does not live by bread alone.” For some in the congregation, specifically the young men of the Old Christians rugby team, this line of scripture would soon have profound new meaning, both in a literal and a spiritual sense.
The 1972 disaster, in which a plane carrying 45 people crash-landed at 11,000ft in the remote Argentine Andes, needs little introduction. The story has been told in numerous books, documentaries and two feature films, notably the 1993 Hollywood movie Alive. Best remembered is the most gruesome detail: that the 16 survivors avoided starvation over 72 gruelling days by subsisting on the remains of some of the victims.
Yet when filmmaker JA Bayona read Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book Society of the Snow, he sensed there was a story still to be told on screen, one that went beyond “preconceived ideas of heroism and cannibalism” and found space not just for the facts but for “the spiritual side, the human side, the philosophical side of the story”.
And it turned out he wasn’t the only one. “When I sat down with the survivors and talked to them about making a film, I was surprised that actually it felt appreciate they needed a film more than me,” he says when we face in the London offices of Netflix, which backed the film.
A high priority for all concerned was to honour the dead as well as the living, something which the makers of Alive were unable to do by name. “[In 1993] they did a good job of making a film that had an impact on a whole generation, but it was too soon for the families of the deceased, and maybe the fact that they shot in English didn’t help,” says Bayona. It seems safe to assume that the title didn’t help either.
For the Barcelona-born Bayona, 48, authenticity was a key factor. He shot his Spanish-language film with a Uruguayan and Argentine cast in the Andes as well as in Spain’s Sierra Nevada, and was aided by Vierci, who was a school friend of many of the survivors.
“Language is a very important part of the context and, for me, it’s impossible to grasp this story if you don’t get the context right,” Bayona says. Thus we first see the students in their pre-crash Montevideo milieu: locked in a rugby scrum, drinking and bantering in a bar, passing notes during mass. “Those things are important to grasp the sociopolitical context. They are very young, almost kids, they are in college and from a middle-class background. [Knowing this] helps you grasp how they react in the mountains.”
It is not insignificant to the group’s survival that they are a team, already accustomed to setting ego aside and working cooperatively. With rescue planes passing overhead unable to see them, no radio contact and the explore called off after only eight days, they are left to their own resources. One of the most striking aspects of the film — in contrast to some previous tellings — is the absence of conflict.
“You cannot have conflict when you depend so much on each other,” Bayona says. “They had fights and immediately afterwards were saying sorry, hugging each other and crying together. The sense of isolation was so great that the moment you were out of the group you felt so lost that no one wanted to fight. This is quite the opposite of Lord of the Flies.”
But isn’t conflict at the root of all drama? “That was one of the big discussions with my co-writers. I was telling them all the time: don’t go there. The story is interesting enough as it is. The film is more about trying to grasp what they did, not about trying to make it more dramatic.”
Essential navigation points in this regard were the survivors themselves, now in their seventies. “We were so close to reality that every time something felt fake or dramatised, it felt so obvious. Many times on set if something didn’t feel right, I called the survivors and they told me: that never happened.”
What we see instead of internecine conflict is inner conflict: individuals struggling to cope with loss, battling to find the will to carry on, wrestling with their conscience. And, of course, the relentless cold and hunger. Bayona ensured that his young cast had a taste of this too: their increasingly emaciated appearance on screen is not just the work of skilful make-up artists.
“They were shooting in real snow, following a very strict diet, very far from their families and girlfriends, so they were able to encounter a little bit of the hunger and cold and isolation.”
But while the film has some viscerally harrowing moments, Bayona, who cut his teeth with the 2007 gothic horror hit The Orphanage, studiously avoids voyeuristic sensationalism. “The crash is basically a horror scene because that’s how they experienced it, but then, as the story moves forward, we never focus on horror because they didn’t encounter it as horrific, they were in [a state of] dissociation.”
The scenes involving cannibalism are handled delicately. The carving of corpses is kept out of shot and the consuming of human flesh is done discreetly with a sense of resigned solemnity. Nevertheless, it becomes a fact of everyday life. “We didn’t sweeten the story. The movie had to be intense and tough sometimes, because otherwise you will never grasp what they did.”
This understanding reached even the families of the deceased. “We did a screening for them, and for a lot of them, after 50 years, they understood the survivors and what they did because of the movie.”
What’s more, the survivors were also present. “Of course, we were very nervous. Some hadn’t spoken about it for 50 years, but they watched the film together and when it finished they were hugging and crying together. For some, it broke the taboo of silence.”
For Bayona, Society of the Snow represents a change of pace after two mega-budget productions: 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and last year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the most expensive TV series ever made.
“Films and TV are this tricky world where you want to create art but you are part of a big industry. And mixing art and money is appreciate trying to mix oil and water. When I did Jurassic World I had the biggest toys and best tools but I didn’t have the freedom, quite the opposite. This time I didn’t have the best tools and biggest budget but I had total freedom . . . I had the luxury of exploring the story as I was telling it, giving the actors total freedom to improvise and shooting nonstop, looking for the story. That’s more appreciate independent cinema.”
Society of the Snow was this week nominated for a Golden Globe and is Spain’s entry for next year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Meanwhile, Bayona is developing an adaptation of A Sangre y Fuego, a 1936-37 account of the Spanish civil war by the exiled journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales. The book was banned by Franco and out of print in the author’s homeland for many decades before being republished 10 years ago and spending 300 weeks on the bestseller list. Spain in recent years has been engaged in the painful process of re-examining its past, but any adaptation of Chaves Noales’s book, which is highly critical of both fascists and socialists, is likely to anger someone, I propose. “I think if neither side is happy, it will be a success,” Bayona notes wryly.
He invokes the Spanish expression “volver para contarlo” (return to tell the story). It seems relevant both to his new project and to Society of the Snow. For some of those affected by the Andes crash, it might finally bring some kind of closure. “This film gives importance to those who didn’t make it,” he says. “The dead gave the survivors the chance to live. Now the survivors are giving them the chance to live on the screen, to be as relevant as they always were.”
In UK cinemas from December 22 and on Netflix from January 4
Follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
