Society of the Snow: Netflix film reveals truth of 1972 Andean plane crash

Survivors in the plane's tail in November 1972. On October 13 that year, the plane carrying the Uruguayan rugby team Old Christians and other passengers crashed in the Andes. Photo / Getty Images

Over Zoom from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, two remarkable men, with half a century in age between them, are discussing what it was like to play the same, but also starkly different, role: of someone who survived the impossible, against obliterating odds, by doing the unthinkable.

“It was about having that feeling that there was no other option, no alternative,” 22-year-old Mexican actor Matias Recalt explains of the challenge of getting into the mindset of Roberto Canessa. He was one of the 16 students and rugby players – of a total number of 45 crew and passengers – who survived the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight F571 in the Andes and the group’s subsequent 72-day ordeal. “Especially because my character takes the initiative.”

The “initiative” – told supremely tastefully, as it were, in Society of the Snow, a new film from director J. A. Bayona (The Impossible, The Orphanage) – was to eat the flesh of their dead fellow passengers.

I ask the 70-year-old Canessa – who was then a teenage medical student and member of the Old Christians rugby club, and is now a world-renowned paediatric cardiologist who ran for Uruguayan president in 2012 – how difficult it was to reach that decision.

“It’s very interesting,” he begins, speaking in English (Recalt speaks through a Spanish-language translator also on the video call). “In the mountain were normal people faced with terrible situations. In the place we were, there was no democracy. I just told all the people around me what was my idea. Coincidentally, other people had the same idea.”

Of course, Canessa has had 50 years of people taking the “simplistic approach”, one partly fostered by an earlier film, 1993 Hollywood yarn Alive, that he and his teammates “saved yourself because you ate the dead people”. He shakes his head.

“No, man: we saved ourselves because we were a team. Because we fought against the cold. Because we climbed the mountain in 10 days,” he says, referring to the life-or-death trek out of the Andes that he and fellow survivor Nando Parrado undertook that, ultimately, saved everyone.

“I believe the cannibalism is something that brings you to the story. But then you realise that it’s a lot more complex and a lot more interesting. When you cut a piece [of flesh] and you’re thinking about eating it, I thought, ‘I shouldn’t do this. No one obliged me. Why should I do this?’

“Then I thought of my mother,” he continues. “She was going to have a son that died. And I had the chance to say, ‘Mummy, don’t cry anymore – I am alive!’ With this idea, I would have eaten the plane pieces or whatever,” Canessa adds, a glancing reference to the fact the survivors had previously attempted to eat the plane’s leather seats. “This is why I think it’s a very strong story: it’s real, and what Matias did [in the film] was magnificent. He just portrayed the process. That, in only a two-hour film, is very difficult, because he only had very few moments to encourage the idea. And he was incredibly accurate in the way he handled it.”

The survivors spent days agonising over their decision. All were Catholics and were worried about damning their eternal souls by breaching such an inviolable taboo. Some had to be persuaded to eat human flesh by imagining it was holy communion. In fact, after their rescue, they received penance from priests who assured them they hadn’t committed a sin because of the extreme nature of their situation.

Society of the Snow is based on the book of the same title, published in 2008, by Uruguayan author Pablo Vierci. During the filming of The Impossible, Bayona’s 2012 film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, “he gave the actors in that film – Tom Holland for example – the book”, explains Canessa.

“The Impossible is infused with your story,” wrote the Spanish director in a 2011 letter to Vierci, included in a new edition of his book, “in the realms where all extreme and profound experiences overlap: the unique human capacity for sacrificing yourself for another; the unknown that gives way to the certainty of death; the relief and the guilt felt by those who survive…”

Canessa and his fellow survivors felt they could trust the film-maker. “The idea was to make it with a Spanish-speaking cast, and with Uruguayan accents – not even Argentinian. As you will understand, Scottish accents, English accents and Irish accents are as different as accents are here in South America. So the film felt like it was a more serious, more in-depth conception of what happened in the mountains.

“And the seriousness of Bayona: he took 10 years, he came down here and taped 50 hours of interviews with the survivors. That let us know that something with a lot of [care] was going to be done. What I didn’t realise was that he was going to do it with his artistic point-of-view – give it a different angle. Give it the angle of a person that died in the crash,” he says, referring to Bayona’s decision to make the narrator of the film Numa Turcatti, who died on the 60th day in the mountains.

That care meant Society of the Snow carefully eschews what we might call cannibal porn, yet is still unstinting in portraying the horrors of the experience. The crash itself is terrifyingly depicted, as is the subsequent avalanche that killed another eight of the passengers. Canessa acutely remembers being entombed in the wrecked fuselage.

“When I was in the avalanche and I tried my best to get out, I realised I was dying. I got shortness of breath, and I peed on myself. I felt all the warmth of the urine between my legs. I said, ‘I’m dying. But it’s not that bad, dying.’ In a way, I lost the fear of death.

“I think that death is a good way to go – for example, with my patients, when they are suffering and they are bleeding, and they die, there’s the peacefulness of death. So death is something you should consider part of your life until the day you die. But what about the other days, man? What do you think about the rest of the days? So, I think people worry more about death than it deserves.”

The crashed Uruguayan Air Force Flight F571 in the Andes in 1972. Photo / Wikimedia Commons

Crucially, Society of the Snow – which was nominated on Dec 11 for a Golden Globe in the Best Picture, Non-English Language category – foregrounds not just those who lived, but the 29 who died, too. Alive not only featured largely American actors, with Canessa portrayed by Josh Hamilton and Parrado by Ethan Hawke, but also purposefully misnamed the dead.

“This is something I am very happy about with the film: it gives honour to these families,” says Canessa. “Because in the first film, they were afraid to use the real names of the ones that had died. But in this film, they are all there.”

As part of their preparation, all the young actors spent time with their real-life counterparts, or with the families of the bereaved. For Recalt, this was “incredibly important. Not only to meet Roberto but also his family, his wife, his children, and really get to know his life – see his house, his neighbourhood. Also, seeing how people treat him, and how he treats other people, and what he represents to everyone who knows him.”

That society of the snow persists to this day: many of the survivors and the bereaved still live in the same neighbourhoods in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. Rather than guilt or recrimination, there has been a deep, 50-year bond between all parties.

“Yes, of course,” says Canessa firmly. “Now I’m going to school [to collect] my 4-year-old grandson, five minutes from my house. And I meet all the families of the ones that died. My grandson says, ‘Grandpa, I want to climb mountains like you to save my friends’.”

Speaking like the motivational speaker he is, he adds: “This is a very strong story for building characters in nowadays lives when we are so materialistic and don’t imagine that, when your [metaphorical] plane would crash, you’ll realise how [strong you can be].”

I ask Canessa about his relationship with Parrado in particular. Because of their epic trek out of the wilderness, do they have an extra special bond?

“That’s another fascinating part of the story,” he replies. “We were like one climbing the mountain. I was hugging him because his clothes were very short because they didn’t belong to him… But we are very different. He likes car racing, and I am a paediatric cardiologist. When he goes to London, he visits Jackie Stewart. When I go to London, I go to the [Royal] Brompton [Hospital] to visit my friends in paediatric cardiology who do incredible things.”

Nonetheless, these old friends still get together and have barbecues. He and Parrado are godfathers to each other’s children. “But that’s something that happens in life. When you’re young and have a group of friends, life then brings you to different places.

“So the story is full of realism,” Canessa concludes. “If this was fictional, no one would believe it. You have a plane crash, you survive, then you have an avalanche that kills eight more people, then two people trek out of the mountain – come on, no one would buy that! But how it happened is how it’s shown in the film.”