Society of the Snow

The narrator is not one of the survivors. The film is told by Numa Turcatti, who died on the mountain shortly before the rescue and is played by Enzo Vogrincic. The cast is largely unknown Uruguayan and Argentine actors, and Carlitos Páez, who survived the crash, plays his own father. The actors were put on a medically supervised weight loss programme, so the wasting on screen happened over the shoot rather than in makeup. Most of the mountain work was done in Spain, on fuselage sets built at Sierra Nevada. A stripped down crew went up to the real crash site in the Andes with no lighting, one small generator and a three day walk in; the cinematographer Pedro Luque says he lost about 11 kilos. Entered by Spain, it was nominated for the Academy Awards for international feature film and for makeup and hairstyling, and lost both. At the Goyas it won 12 of its 13 nominations, taking best film and best director for J. A. Bayona, with Matías Recalt named best new actor. A good fit if you want the dead named one by one and the survivors’ decision neither excused nor judged. Not for viewers disturbed by images of bodies and death: the film does not cover up the eating of human flesh.