Netflix has released the trailer for Society of the Snow, the new movie from director J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, The Impossible, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), which has already earned major acclaim as Spain’s submission for the 2024 Oscars.
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Older movie fans will almost certainly check out the trailer for Society of the Snow (watch below) and recognize it as a new telling of the 1970s survival story of the Uruguayan rugby team aboard Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes Mountains in South America, while en route to a match in Chile. After days in the frozen terrain, the surviving passengers had to go to unthinkable lengths to avoid both starvation and hypothermia.
The story of the Flight 571 survivors was previously told in British writer Paul Read’s 1974 book Alive: the Story of the Andes Survivors, which was then adapted into the 1993 film Alive by director Frank Marshall (Congo, Arachnophobia). Alive was only a modest critical and box office hit, but later became some of a ’90s cult hit – largely because of the (SPOILERS) dark turn in the story where the survivors must resort to cannibalism in order to avoid starving. That sequence became a source of parody on everything from late-night talk shows to The Simpsons.
For that very same reason, the 1990s version of Alive is also criticized for turning the experience of the Flight 571 survivors into an overly-polished Hollywood fantasy. Society of the Snow is based on “La sociedad de la nieve”, a novel by Uruguayan journalist, author, and screenwriter, Pablo Vierci. Bayona’s film looks like it will depict more of the grim reality of what it was like trying to survive, and (hopefully) more of the ethical and psychological complexity – not to mention the toll – of the decisions that had to be made.
Surviving was a group effort. Society of the Snow, a movie from Juan Antonio Bayona about one of the most remarkable stories of the 20th century and selected to represent Spain at the Oscars® 2024.
The film is produced by Belén Atienza, Sandra Hermida and J.A. Bayona. It stars Enzo Vogrincic, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Esteban Kukuriczka and Tomas Wolf, with a screenplay by J.A. Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, Nicolás Casariego. Based on the novel by Pablo Vierci.
Society of the Snow is coming to selected cinemas in December and to Netflix on January 4th.
