The Big Picture

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes in 1972, leaving 29 survivors who had to resort to extreme measures to stay alive. The survivors created a small community, sharing limited food and resources and even eating the bodies of those who died. After 72 days, a group of survivors embarked on a dangerous climb to find help, leading to their rescue and the end of their ordeal.

“What happens when the world deserts you?” This question, among many others, is one of the opening lines of J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, a disturbing, harrowing, and yet hopeful film that is now available on Netflix. The question isn’t in any way an exaggeration: it is a legitimate doubt expressed by the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which, in 1972, crashed and fell in the Andes mountain range. Deemed dead by the authorities after a ten-day-long search proved fruitless, the flight’s 32 survivors – the members of an amateur rugby team, as well as their friends and families – found themselves forced to resort to the unthinkable to remain alive in what is functionally a snowy desert known as the Valley of Tears. After 72 days, they were rescued. Only 16 of them remained.

The story of Flight 571 is one of those real-life events that is just too incredible for humans to resist turning it into some sort of fiction. And, indeed, in 1976, merely four years after the disaster, the first movie about the plight of the Old Christians rugby team was released: René Cardona Jr.’s Survive!, based on the book of the same name by Clay Blair Jr. In 1993, Frank Marshall directed Alive following the blueprint laid out by Piers Paul Read in his book, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. Now, it’s Bayona’s turn to retell the so-called “miracle of the Andes,” once again with a book on his hands: written by Bayona himself, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego, the screenplay for Society of the Snow is based on Pablo Vierci’s work of the same name.

Society of the Snow In 1972, the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, catastrophically crashes on a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash and finding themselves in one of the world’s toughest environments, they are forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive. – Netflix Release Date January 4, 2024 Cast Enzo Vogrincic , Esteban Bigliardi , Simon Hempe , Matías Recalt Rating R Runtime 144 minutes

What Happened to Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571?
As explained in Society of the Snow, up until 1972, no plane crash in the Andes had ever left any survivors. So, initially, when search parties came back empty-handed, Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan authorities believed that the worst had happened to all the passengers of chartered flight 571, the members and supporters of a rugby team that was on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, for a match. However, death didn’t befall all the passengers of the flight that crashed in the mountains due to a piloting error on that fateful October 13. As a matter of fact, only 13 of the plane’s 40 passengers and 5 crew members died at the moment of the crash, in which the vehicle was split in half. Others would perish during their first night in the snow due to injuries or to the extreme cold, that, in the Andes, can reach as low as 40 degrees below zero.

Still, 29 survivors remained awaiting rescue in the mountains that separate Argentina from Chile. Again, by the end, due to injuries, starvation, avalanches, and low temperatures, their numbers would, little by little, be reduced. Nonetheless, the survivors managed to create a small community for themselves, sharing the little food that they had – bars of chocolate and nougat, caramels, dried plums and salt crackers, amidst other plane treats, according to The Guardian – and making sure that no one else would freeze to death. They even made makeshift sunglasses to protect themselves from snow blindness. Those who had some specialized knowledge tended to the injured and tried to fix parts of the plane such as the radio, that would allow them to hear news of their fall and maybe even make some contact with civilization. It was through this radio that they learned that the authorities had called off the searches until the summer, when the snow in the Andes began to melt.

Trapped in the icy desert, the survivors started to thin out. But the cold and the wounds caused by the crash were not the only problems. To fend off starvation, the survivors, most of whom were young men in their twenties, had to resort to eating the bodies of those who had been killed by the accident. They even went as far as making a pact among themselves, promising that, if they died, they would give each other permission to feed on their flesh.

“We have just some chocolates and biscuits for 29 people, so we start getting very weak immediately. So maybe a week, we try to eat the leather shoes and the leather belts. But it was impossible to get the proteins from there, so we start a mental process to convince our minds that was the only way. We’re not going to do nothing wrong. And at last, I was convinced that it was the only way to live. I want to live,” survivor Eduardo Strauch told NPR in 2019.

Related ‘Society of the Snow’ Review: A Gripping Take on a Devastating True Story Technically immersive if a little narratively shaky at times, the year in cinema is still not complete until you see this film.

That was not enough, however, to keep all the 29 survivors alive until the very end. The narrator of Bayona’s film, Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic) was the last one of 13 who died as a result of snowstorms and infected injuries that could not be properly treated outside of a hospital. He passed away on December 11. One day later, Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella), Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt), and Antonio Vizintín (Augustín Della Corte) began a climb that would save the lives of the remaining 16 survivors. Having tried previously to march towards Argentina without success, they took some frozen meat and a makeshift sleeping bag towards the Chilean side of the mountains. Ten days later, Parrado and Canessa reached a stream by which they found a group of Chilean farmers.

Are There Any Differences Between ‘Society of the Snow’ and What Happened in Real Life?

Unlike what is shown in the movie, though, this encounter did not mean immediate rescue. Instead, the men returned to where they had found Parrado and Canessa on the following day, now with a piece of paper tied to a rock. They threw the rock towards the other side of the river, where the two men were, and Parrado wrote them a message explaining their situation. Between December 22 and 23, 1972, the 16 survivors of Flight 571 were removed by helicopter from the mountain range and taken to hospitals for medical examination. Also not depicted in the movie is the plane’s brief stop in Mendoza, Argentina, due to bad weather. Since the flight had been chartered by the Uruguayan Air Force, the plane did not have permission to stay on Argentinian soil for more than 24 hours, and thus had to fly under less-than-ideal conditions, especially for its already old and weak engines.

Apart from these little changes made to ensure more dynamic storytelling, however, most of what happens in Society of the Snow is pretty faithful to the events of 1972 – or, at least, to how the survivors remember them. Even the letters written by some of the young men and the insistence by one of them on registering their plight through photographs are real: it isn’t hard to find actual pictures of the survivors in the Andes, and some even made their way to Society of the Snow’s end credits. Many of the 14 rescued men still living today – José Luís Inciarte (Simon Hempe) passed away in July 2023, while Javier Methol (Esteban Bigliardi) died in 2015 – served as consultants for the film. Played by Felipe Gonzalez Otaño, Carlitos Páez even has a cameo in the movie as his own father, who phones home to read out the names of the survivors at the end.

Overall, survivors seem to be pretty pleased with the result of J.A. Bayona’s efforts, which started back in 2011, two years after the original publication of Verci’s book. On Letterboxd, there are at least two extremely positive reviews claiming to be from relatives of survivors, and, in an interview with The Guardian, Nando Parrado called it a “magnificent piece of filmmaking.”

“He has captured the essence of what we went through very, very well. Even my wife, when the movie finished, she grabbed my arm, she said: ‘F**k, man. I didn’t know it was so hard. Now I understand,’” he stated.

Society of the Snow is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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