It’s a story that, 51 years later, still stuns. In 1972, a Uruguayan plane carrying 45 people crashed in the Andes Mountains. Provisions were so few and conditions were so dire that survivors resorted to eating the flesh of their fallen passengers, a grim twist that would be recounted in multiple adaptations of the disaster—and be cribbed by Yellowjackets—including J.A. Bayona’s new Oscar contender, Society of the Snow.
“I didn’t have any doubts…. This is the only way out,” remembered Nando Parrado, a survivor whose mother, sister, and best friend died as a result of the crash. Parrado was part of the Uruguayan rugby team known as the Old Christians, whose members had been aboard the plane. Speaking to The Guardian ahead of Society of the Snow’s release, he explained that the group did not arrive at their decision lightly.
They were eating snow to stay hydrated, living out of the fuselage of the plane (walled off by suitcases), and growing increasingly desperate as their stockpile of food dwindled. Some had even tried eating leather. They had managed to find a working transistor radio in the wreckage, and after hearing that the rescue mission for their plane was called off, the survivors settled on their last sustenance option. “Everybody in that situation…would have arrived at the same thought,” Parrado told The Guardian.
Parrado has been one of several survivors to speak out in support of the Spanish film, which has been short-listed for best international feature at the 2024 Academy Awards and is currently streaming on Netflix. The last major film adaptation of the disaster was 1993’s Alive, which starred Ethan Hawke as a character who improbably had blown-out hair every day he was stranded on the mountain. Based on Pablo Vierci’s book Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story, Bayona’s film was made as a more culturally grounded homage to both those who survived the devastating event and those who didn’t. The filmmaker, who previously helmed the Oscar-nominated The Impossible and the billion-dollar blockbuster Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, also hoped to make the depiction of the catastrophe as authentic as possible.
The wreckage of the chartered Uruguayan plane that crashed on October 13, while flying members of the Old Christian Brother rugby team from Montevideo to Santigao.By Bettmann Archive / Getty Images.
As Bayona explained to Vanity Fair: “We planned to shoot the story almost like a documentary. We prepared the actors; we gave them all the information; we rehearsed the script for almost two months; we went through all the scenes. They read the book; they got in contact with the survivors or the families of the victims. And they spent 72 days in the mountains. We shot for 140 days. We took the time to go through all the important moments. We were ready with our cameras as if we were shooting a documentary to capture that.”
The filmmaker also kept the cast on a medically supervised diet and shot their time in the mountains chronologically so that the actors could grow their hair and slim down in sequence. “We really wanted to be very close to the reality,” said Bayona.
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