LOS ANGELES — On Oct. 12, 1972, the Old Christians Club rugby team boarded a Uruguayan Air Force flight from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile.
The team had a scheduled game that would never be played because the plane, carrying 45 passengers including crew, crashed in the Andes in an area known as the Valley of Tears.
Of the 45 people onboard, 29 survived the crash. Those who escaped the crash faced extreme cold, thirst and hunger.
Forced to take extreme measures, survivors of the crash turned to cannibalism, eating those who had died in order to stay alive.
Two-and-a-half-months after the crash, on Dec. 23, 1972, only 16 crash survivors were rescued.
Those harrowing events are told in the new Netflix film, “Society of the Snow,” which is also based on the book of the same title.
Among the survivors was Roberto Canessa, who after 51 years still remembers the feeling of being rescued.
“I knew I was back to civilization. I was looking at the food in the rugby socks, and now I had to bury them because the society of the snow was over. It was not needed anymore,” he told Spectrum News.
Canessa does not shy away about the events that occurred. He says he still, to this day, keeps in touch with the families of those who did not survive, and families of those they had to eat in order to stay alive.
“The parents of the kids who died on the mountain, we had to take care of them and help them. We had to buy them a house. My neighbor died in the plane crash. We had to get the team going again. My sons went to the same school as the cousins of the ones who died. We are a community,” he said.
Canessa says that despite everything he lived through, his faith in God never faltered.
“We have a very powerful friend. We can ring his bell and he will probably help us. Sometimes He helps us in a way we don’t understand, but He is always there,” he said.
Was the survivors’ “society of the snow” a miracle or a tragedy? The film’s director, J.A. Bayona, told Spectrum News the film gives the audience the space to decide for themselves.
“At the end of the movie, the narrator says: ‘Each of you is an answer.’ The movie gets more interesting when every single member of the audience gets their own interpretation on it,” he said.
Bayona also says because survivors were such a big part of the film, those who have seen it, have appreciated the realism and, for the first time, really got the impression of being back to that place.
Most of the film was shot in a ski resort in Spain, but Bayona said the film crew went three times to the Andes.
“We shot backgrounds, and we photographed everything. We spent more than 20 days there trying to understand how the place was. At the end, we went with the actors and we shot some scenes. It was very powerful to be there, very inspiring. It is not a safe place. It takes you three days to get there, but it gave us all the information we needed in order to recreate the location in Spain,” he said.
“Society of the Snow” opens in select theaters this weekend and will stream on Netflix starting Jan. 4.
Click the arrow above to watch the full interview with Roberto Canessa and the film’s director J.A. Bayona.
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