J.A. Bayona, Belén Atienza & Survivor Roberto Canessa On Finding The Spirituality In ‘Society Of The Snow’ – Contenders International
deadline.comSociety of the Snow, directed by Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona and Spain’s submission into the 2024 Oscar race, is based on the true story of the 1972 Andes flight disaster in which a flight carrying Uruguay’s Old Christians Club rugby team for a match in Santiago, Chile, crashed on a glacier at the Valle de las Lágrimas (Valley of Tears).
Of the 45 people aboard Flight 571 only 16 survived, including Roberto Canessa, who joined producer Belén Atienza and Bayona to discuss the film for Deadline’s Contenders Film: International.
The Netflix movie is adapted from Pablo Vierci’s 2008 book La Sociedad de La Nieve [Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story], which gives it distance from previous books and films about the story. “You can that tell in this new take you have the gravitas, the weight of the time that has passed,” said Bayona. “It’s a much more spiritual book which was a challenge; what made the book so exciting to me was that it was so much bigger than I thought it was.
But it was in terms of the spiritual and how I was going to be able translate the spiritual level to the movie, was the big challenge here.” Canessa was there, and he recounted that “we thought that we had to buy time, the search has been called off, the weather was terrible … and to buy time you must eat something,” after which he reveals that up in the mountains he lost 30 kilograms.
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