‘Society of the Snow’: The Real-Life Story That Inspired the Dark Oscar Contender

It’s a story that, 51 years later, still stuns. In 1972, a Uruguayan plane carrying 45 people crashed in the Andes Mountains. Provisions were so few and conditions were so dire that survivors resorted to eating the flesh of their fallen passengers, a grim twist that would be recounted in multiple adaptations of the disaster—and be cribbed by Yellowjackets—including J.A. Bayona’s new Oscar contender, Society of the Snow.

“I didn’t have any doubts…. This is the only way out,” remembered Nando Parrado, a survivor whose mother, sister, and best friend died as a result of the crash. Parrado was part of the Uruguayan rugby team known as the Old Christians, whose members had been aboard the plane. Speaking to The Guardian ahead of Society of the Snow’s release, he explained that the group did not arrive at their decision lightly.

They were eating snow to stay hydrated, living out of the fuselage of the plane (walled off by suitcases), and growing increasingly desperate as their stockpile of food dwindled. Some had even tried eating leather. They had managed to find a working transistor radio in the wreckage, and after hearing that the rescue mission for their plane was called off, the survivors settled on their last sustenance option. “Everybody in that situation…would have arrived at the same thought,” Parrado told The Guardian.

Parrado has been one of several survivors to speak out in support of the Spanish film, which has been short-listed for best international feature at the 2024 Academy Awards and is currently streaming on Netflix. The last major film adaptation of the disaster was 1993’s Alive, which starred Ethan Hawke as a character who improbably had blown-out hair every day he was stranded on the mountain. Based on Pablo Vierci’s book Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story, Bayona’s film was made as a more culturally grounded homage to both those who survived the devastating event and those who didn’t. The filmmaker, who previously helmed the Oscar-nominated The Impossible and the billion-dollar blockbuster Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, also hoped to make the depiction of the catastrophe as authentic as possible. 

The wreckage of the chartered Uruguayan plane that crashed on October 13, while flying members of the Old Christian Brother rugby team from Montevideo to Santigao.By Bettmann Archive / Getty Images.

As Bayona explained to Vanity Fair: “We planned to shoot the story almost like a documentary. We prepared the actors; we gave them all the information; we rehearsed the script for almost two months; we went through all the scenes. They read the book; they got in contact with the survivors or the families of the victims. And they spent 72 days in the mountains. We shot for 140 days. We took the time to go through all the important moments. We were ready with our cameras as if we were shooting a documentary to capture that.”

The filmmaker also kept the cast on a medically supervised diet and shot their time in the mountains chronologically so that the actors could grow their hair and slim down in sequence. “We really wanted to be very close to the reality,” said Bayona.

Another survivor of the crash, Gustavo Zerbino, told the Associated Press that reliving the experience through Society of the Snow felt like being submerged in “boiling water.” “Fortunately, that feeling ended in two and a half hours,” he added.

All of the real-life survivors previously told their stories in Gonzalo Arijón’s documentary Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, released in the US in 2008. Recounting the crash that one survivor called “the worst nightmare you can imagine,” they described cannibalism as their only means of survival—something “I don’t think any animal is capable of doing” under normal circumstances. However, not all of the survivors believe that what they resorted to was cannibalism.

“Cannibalism is when you kill someone, so technically this is what is known as anthropophagy,” Roberto Canessa told National Geographic in 2016. A medical student at the time of the crash, Canessa said that he cared for the injured people and “was also in charge of carting the dead bodies.” Since surviving the disaster, Canessa has gone on to become a renowned pediatric cardiologist, and has spoken about the situation plainly. He told National Geographic:

We had to eat these dead bodies, and that was it. The flesh had protein and fat, which we needed, like cow meat. I was also used to medical procedures, so it was easier for me to make the first cut. The decision to accept it intellectually is only one step, though. The next step is to actually do it. And that was very tough. Your mouth doesn’t want to open because you feel so miserable and sad about what you have to do.

My main issue was that I was invading the privacy of my friends: raping their dignity by invading their bodies. But then I thought, If I were killed, I would feel proud that my body could be used for others to survive. I feel that I shared a piece of my friends not only materially but spiritually, because their will to live was transmitted to us through their flesh. We made a pact that, if we died, we would be happy to put our bodies to the service of the rest of the team.

Bayona has insisted that in his film, as in the book on which it’s based, “cannibalism is quite a secondary theme.” Speaking to The Wrap, he said, “There’s another idea that is on top of that, which is the extreme humanism and the bond established between the group. So, of course, the film includes the cannibalism, but it is turned upside down and secondary to the love, friendship, and camaraderie in the story.”

Canessa and Parrado eventually left the crash site to attempt to find help. With slim food rations and a homemade sleeping bag constructed from plane cushions, they hiked more than 35 miles over high peaks in 10 days, finally stumbling upon a Chilean shepherd. (“They smelled of the grave; no animal would go near them,” the shepherd said, according to The New York Times.) Parrado directed rescuers back to the crash site via helicopter, and survivors were flown to a hospital in Santiago just a few days before Christmas. Some had shrunk to half of their precrash weight; some were treated for dehydration, broken bones, malnutrition, frostbite, and scurvy.

Doctors and nurses carry two plane crash survivors to the infirmary at Colchague Regiment following their rescue. Two men hiked for ten days out of the Andean wilderness to alert authorities that 14 of their fellow passengers were still alive and living in the snow covered wreckage of the plane that crashed in the mountains ten weeks ago. A helicopter was dispatched to the scene and rescued six of the survivors before bad weather prevented a return flight.From Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

“We did things that in other circumstances could seem to be morbid or macabre,” 24-year-old José Luis Inciarte said in a press conference shortly after the rescue. “They were unspeakable things that could never be told. Yet what we did was really Christian.” (Two spokesmen for the Roman Catholic Church determined the survivors “acted justifiably.” Their statement clarified that “a person is permitted to eat dead human flesh if there is no feasible alternative for survival.”)

To this day, the remaining survivors reunite each year on December 22, the anniversary of their rescue, and maintain a brotherhood of sorts. Some screened Society of the Snow last year and described it as the most realistic depiction of the hell they faced. “I told the director: ‘After people see this film, they will really understand what we went through,’” Parrado told The Guardian. “Even my wife, when the movie finished, she grabbed my arm, she said: ‘Fuck, man. I didn’t know it was so hard.’”