The Snow Society
The society of the coming It is presented as one of the favorites to win the Oscar in the category of best foreign film. Despite its sensitive content, the Spanish film directed by JA Bayona has received mostly positive reviews from survey platforms and academic experts. However, this was not the producer's original idea.
The story behind Juan Antonio Bayona's film has its origins in a book of the same name by Uruguayan author Pablo Vierci, which, at the same time, is inspired by a documentary by Gonzalo Arijón, which recounts the accident of Air Force Flight 571. Uruguayan in the Andes mountain range in 1972. Vierci's title welcomes the stories of the survivors in a respectful and human way.
Synopsis of The society of the coming
Origin of the accident
On Friday, October 13, 1972, the Fairchild FH-227D left Montevideo, Uruguay, bound for Santiago, Chile. However, he was never able to reach his destination. As the plane crossed the Andes mountain range, white clouds covered the mountains. The pilots, believing that the aircraft was flying over Curicó, crossed to the north to make a descent at Los Cerrillos Airport.
Unfortunately, they did not realize that their flight instruments indicated that they were still between 60 and 70 km from Curicó. thinking that They were still flying over the Andes, they descended ahead of time and hit the edge of the mountain. The result was catastrophic. The tail section and both wings detached from the fuselage, causing the craft to crash to the ground.
A story of survival and resistance in the Andes
The Fairchild FH-227D was carrying 5 crew and 40 passengers, including 19 members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, along with some family, supporters and friends. Three crew members and two passengers died during the impact. When night fell, in the cold of winter, four more people died. They were seriously injured, and the frost accelerated their death.
During the following weeks, twelve more people died, eight of them victims of avalanches. For its part, the remaining 16 survivors had to endure 72 days of hardship and aberrations: frostbite, Hunger and thirst. Finally, they were rescued on December 21, 1972. After months of fighting post-traumatic stress, the victims of the accident were able to confess that they had to resort to cannibalism.
Survivors speak for first time since plane crash
To write his work, the author Pablo Vierci accompanied the 16 survivors of the Fairchild FH-227D flight and their children to the mountain. As they moved forward, each of them told what they remembered from the 72 days they were stranded. In the mountain range. In this way, there are anecdotes of how they learned about death, what an accident like that meant to them and how it changed their lives from then on.
A curious fact is that Vierci was a schoolmate of the survivors, and began to write The Snow Society a year after the events. Being so close to the victims helped him understand the events firsthand. Although he could not feel what they did, his conversations urged him to faithfully recreate each of the events, no matter how painful they were.
The most terrible moments of the accident
The book begins from the moments before the accident. Since then, it descends towards the group's survival strategies, the deceased, the avalanche that took away eight of the survivors, the painful decision to feed on the bodies of the wounded, the expedition that was carried out to find help, the days that followed. to the rescue and everything that happened after being taken from the mountain range.
Given his connection with these people, the writer manages to take the reader into what lies beyond all the sensational news and the disrespect on the part of journalists. Pablo Vierci shows that There was not one mountain range, but 16, since each of the men who were forced to resist in the mountain experienced an individual trauma., although he was not alone.
About the movie
The director Antonio Bayona discovered The Snow Society while he was researching to shoot his movie Impossible (2021) He found the story so impressive that, upon completion of filming, he acquired the rights to the book. After that, his team recorded more than one hundred interviews with the survivors who are left alive and their families. The actors also had contact with the victims.
The vision of real people meant that the characterizations were done in the most respectful way possible, avoiding sensationalism at all times. However, The film is not exempt from criticism. Jorge Majfud, the author of Latin American political cinemaEg He stated that the film does not provide anything new regarding the tragedy, and that all it does is comply with class and race quotas.
About the author, Pablo Vierci
Pablo Vierci was born on July 7, 1950, in Montevideo, capital of Uruguay. He is a screenwriter, journalist and author, awarded with several awards thanks to his work. Among his recognitions are the National Prize for Literature of Uruguay in 1987 and 2004 and the Golden Book Prize of the Uruguayan Book Chamber in 2009. In addition, he has won several honors thanks to his work as a screenwriter.
In this area, was honored with the Best Screenplay Award at the 29th Festival cinema from Havana (2007) and the Best Screenplay Award at the 14th Lérida Film Festival (2008). On the other hand, in 2003 she obtained the Citi Journalistic Excellence Award at Columbia University in New York. Her books have been translated into several languages, such as English and Portuguese.
Other books by Pablo Vierci
- The stagehands (1979);
- Little story of a woman (1984);
- Behind the trees (1987);
- 99% killed (2004);
- From Marx to Obama (2010);
- Artigas (2011);
- The deserter (2012);
- They (2014);
- I had to survive (2016);
- The end of innocence (2018);
- The redemption of Pascasio Báez (2021)