Just a bit more about Society of the Snow

I thought I wouldn't see anything that would surpass this in intensity after Beautiful Boy, but then there was a long Wednesday afternoon next to a sick daughter and La sociedad de la nieve came by, a film about the plane crash in the Andes in 1972 where a rugby team had to survive for 72 days in the snow in the Andes. The film is the Spanish entry for the Oscars and has already received a nomination. The disaster was previously filmed in Alive, but this film by Juan Antonio Bayona is indeed the very best version imaginable and here's why. 1. He interviewed the survivors for more than a hundred hours 2. He shot the film in chronological order.

Very unusual because filming scenes out of chronological order (because, for example, you shoot everything that happens in a certain location at once) is much cheaper and faster. He wanted to approach the true character more closely by filming it chronologically. This way you see the actors lose weight and become wild, their nails grow and their skin gets dirty.

3. He filmed at the actual site where the plane crashed
Again an example of something you wouldn't do for the sake of money, because filming at this altitude in this inaccessible place is expensive and dangerous, but he insisted on it.

4. He chose unknown actors and people who had never really acted before
This was because he wanted the group feeling to come across more clearly and so that there wasn't one actor (like Ethan Hawk in Alive) who was much more famous than the others and would therefore get a bigger role. For him, it was important that you could see the group dynamics well.

5. 138 days were filmed with a budget of 65 million euros
Considering that the actors did not earn top salaries and most of the budget was invested in the actual filming, you can assume that a lot of money was spent on the actual shoots.

6. Some survivors appear in the film
For example, Carlitos plays his own father, Nando Parrado is in one of the airport scenes, and Numa Turcatti's nephew is also in the film.

And in reality, it was all even worse.
· Nando and Roberto only had food for three days during their journey to Chile instead of ten days as stated in the film. The journey actually took ten days.

· You see Nando and Roberto in the film after they have seen a man on a horse eating in a forest hut, but in reality, it took another ten hours before the man returned to them. The man did throw a loaf of bread from the other side of the river, so they had something to eat, but not as abundantly as it seems in the film.
· The survivors initially said they survived on cheese and crackers that were on the plane, because they wanted to tell their own families first that they had to survive by eating the bodies of the deceased others.

· The crash site is called the Valle de las Lágrimas, in memory of the disaster. The rescuers returned to the place where they buried the remains of the bodies and placed a cross.

Image: Netflix ‘Society of the Snow’.

Society of the Snow.

6 shocking facts.‘