J.A. Bayona, Belén Atienza & Survivor Roberto Canessa On Finding The Spirituality In ‘Society Of The Snow’ – Contenders International

Baz Bamigboye
·4 min read
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J.A. Bayona, Belén Atienza & Survivor Roberto Canessa On Finding The Spirituality In ‘Society Of The Snow’ – Contenders International
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Society 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.

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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.

There were challenges he said that were “impossible to imagine.”

Canessa said that watching the film, “you feel that you’re sitting back in the fuselage.”

Authenticity was vital for Bayona and his creative team.

Atienaza explained that Bayona and his team shot on location in the Andes three times, recalling that “J.A. was actually on the same spot where the plane crashed, twice. He even slept there. He also got the altitude sickness, he got all the facts to understand what these guys went through.” He sent his cast there too, to experience it for real.

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On the matter of casting, Bayona felt it important not to cast Hollywood names. “Having like a group of unknown faces increased the realism of the film,” he said. “Realism was our goal; we tried to do the most realistic and faithful and respectful approach to the story. We took a group of very young actors. As you can imagine in Uruguay and Argentina there aren’t that many popular faces with that age, they were from 18 to 25. Roberto was 18 … they were very, very young.

“To me the most important thing was to create the real camaraderie, the real friendships and they spent so much time together,” Bayona added. “They went through two months of rehearsals and then we shot for four or five months, so we definitely created our own Society of the Snow on set and it was very effective.

“Because we were shooting chronologically, when somebody was dying that meant that he was leaving the shoot, and you can tell by the faces of the other actors the impact of saying goodbye.”

There’s a moment in the film when a character says “there’s no greater love than to give one’s life for friends,” and Canessa was moved when those words were recited to him. “When you’re dying and you’re going to die, your life doesn’t cost anything so you can give it to anyone around because you think you are dying, but in the mountains there, you knew that your life would help someone else survive.”

Canessa went to on practice medicine and is now a noted pediatric cardiologist — he saves lives. “There’s a way of living I learned in the mountains, there’s a way of facing life. … I knew that to the west was Chile and that I had to walk 100,000 steps to the west where the sun sets, and if I would be able to do that I will survive. And that’s what I do with my patients. I tell them we have a long walk and I’ll be with you.”

Check out the panel video above.

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