2023-08-29 21:28:26
“For society there was no way we could have crashed into the mountain and still be alive, it was impossible for us to bear the cold, it was impossible to cross that wall of snow, rocks and ice and it was even more impossible to continue walking, when we found, behind, endless white mountains, instead of the green valleys that we imagined. It was impossible, yes. But the history of the Andes is a succession of chimeras, of inadmissible situations”. When JA Bayona read these lines for the first time, more than a decade ago, he was so affected by the story of survival that they illustrated that he decided to borrow his most recurring word and use it as the headline ‘The impossible’, the movie I was shooting right at that moment and which was also the story of a catastrophe with a relatively happy ending. belong to the book ‘The Snow Society’, by Pablo Vierciwhich the Barcelonan director has now used as the basis for his eponymous feature film, which on September 10 will become the first Spanish film in history to close an edition of the Venice Exhibition.
The story that ‘The Snow Society’ is equally known as the “tragedy of the Andes” as it is the “miracle of the Andes”: on October 13, 1972, the Fairchild FH-227D flight, traveling between Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, accidentally crashed into a glacier in the Andes due to human error: the pilots began the descent prematurely. 72 days later, the planet discovered that 16 of the 45 passengers on that plane, booked by players from the Uruguayan Old Christians rugby club and their families, had survived; enthusiasm gave way to stupor when it became clear what they had to do to stay alive.
“A Herd of Monkeys”
In the pages of Vierci’s book, someone describes it this way: “It was like a herd of monkeys. Seventy-two days without washing, without taking off our clothes, eating human fleshwhich at first was a small cut but later it became a portion of food and later the peeled bone was left lying around and one would come and grab it and put it in the pocket of the jacket and then start to suck it ahead of the others.”
Many of us first heard of that event thanks to the film ‘They live!’, which Frank Marshall directed in 1993 based on a book written by Piers Paul Read with eminently journalistic intentions. Little to do, then, with the mixture of essay, novel and even poetry offered by Vierci, who in his day was a schoolmate of many of the survivors and who put together his story with fragments of theirs. . To put images, Bayonne decided to shoot the bulk of his movie in the Sierra Nevada, whose proximity to Ecuador allowed the light of the Andes to be reproduced with maximum fidelity. No less than three replicas of the wrecked plane’s fuselage were built, weighing 7,000 kilos and 14 meters long, and one of which had to be transported to more than 3,600 meters above sea level. If one also takes into account that it was a shoot marked by successive climatic setbacksAs blizzard days, capricious anticyclones, and inexplicable haze storms make sense that ‘The Snow Society’ ended up being the most expensive Spanish film produced by Netflix, and one of the most expensive in the history of Spanish cinema.
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