description:
On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered by an Uruguayan rugby football team (the Old Christians Club) and their supporters, to take them to a game in Santiago, Chile, crashes into a glacier in the heart of the Andes mountains. Of the 45 passengers on board, 29 survive the initial crash, although more would die from injury, disease, and an avalanche over the following weeks. Trapped in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet, the survivors are forced to resort to cannibalism of those who had already died in order to stay alive. However, rather than turn against each other, the survivors draw upon the cooperative teamwork they learned through playing rugby at the Stella Maris College and their shared Catholic faith, in order to escape the mountains.
In a 2024 op-ed, two of the survivors, Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino state that they “and others have been telling our story for half a century, but the filmmaker J.A. Bayona has captured it in ways that we find inspiring and fresh all over again. In many respects, Society of the Snow violates a well-worn tenet of all drama: it is a film free of an antagonist. Yes, it is a classic man-versus-nature narrative, but there is no evil present in the film. It is a film free of cynicism, brimming with pure humanity, accessible to a wide spectrum of viewers. It is a film that has broken the boundaries of language with the universal message that everyone has the immeasurable potential to rise to the occasion, thanks, in great part, to the alliances we can and should forge as we share this planet together.”
