Over Zoom from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, two remarkable men, with half a century in age between them, are discussing what it was like to play the same, but also starkly different, role: of someone who survived the impossible, against obliterating odds, by doing the unthinkable.
“It was about having that feeling that there was no other option, no alternative,” 22-year-old Mexican actor Matías Recalt explains of the challenge of getting into the mindset of Roberto Canessa. He was one of the 16 students and rugby players –of a total number of 45 crew and passengers – who survived the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight F571 in the Andes and the group’s subsequent, 72-day ordeal. “Especially because my character takes the initiative.”
The “initiative” – told supremely tastefully, as it were, in Society of the Snow, a new film from director J. A. Bayona (The Impossible, The Orphanage) – was to eat the flesh of their dead fellow passengers. I ask Canessa, 70 – then a teenage medical student and member of the Old Christians rugby club, now a world-renowned paediatric cardiologist who ran for Uruguayan President in 2012 – how difficult it was to reach that decision.
“It’s very interesting,” he begins, speaking in English (Recalt speaks through a Spanish-language translator also on the video call). “In the mountain were normal people faced with terrible situations. In the place we were, there was no democracy. I just told all the people around me what was my idea. Coincidentally, other people had the same idea.”
Of course, Canessa has had 50 years of people taking the “simplistic approach”, one partly fostered by an earlier film, 1993 Hollywood yarn Alive, that he and his teammates “saved yourself because you ate the dead people”. He shakes his head.
If you haven’t read *Miracle in the Andes*, it’s a great read. People, of course, have such a morbid curiosity about how they survived but you can tell the questions really bother the survivors.
They received blessings from the families of those whose bodies sustained them, which I’m sure is the closest form of comfort and forgiveness they will ever have. I couldn’t imagine.
Last Podcast on the Left is covering this right now with Part 1 out now. It’s really good
Wasn’t this already a movie???
The crash scene in Alive, imo, is the scariest crash scene ever filmed.
If I was dead and my body could sustain the lives of my friends so they could return to their loved ones, I would say bon appetit!
The Dark Compakt of the Sea or Custom of the Sea (an unwritten code of sailors in Britains decaying merchant marine fleet which is denied to this day) which detailed how to choose and dispatch unlucky souls so that they might give life to their comrades as well as selecting the one charged with doing the dark deed shows it was an accepted practice even if taboo to acknowledge.
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***The Telegraph writes***
Over Zoom from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, two remarkable men, with half a century in age between them, are discussing what it was like to play the same, but also starkly different, role: of someone who survived the impossible, against obliterating odds, by doing the unthinkable.
“It was about having that feeling that there was no other option, no alternative,” 22-year-old Mexican actor Matías Recalt explains of the challenge of getting into the mindset of Roberto Canessa. He was one of the 16 students and rugby players –of a total number of 45 crew and passengers – who survived the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight F571 in the Andes and the group’s subsequent, 72-day ordeal. “Especially because my character takes the initiative.”
The “initiative” – told supremely tastefully, as it were, in Society of the Snow, a new film from director J. A. Bayona (The Impossible, The Orphanage) – was to eat the flesh of their dead fellow passengers. I ask Canessa, 70 – then a teenage medical student and member of the Old Christians rugby club, now a world-renowned paediatric cardiologist who ran for Uruguayan President in 2012 – how difficult it was to reach that decision.
“It’s very interesting,” he begins, speaking in English (Recalt speaks through a Spanish-language translator also on the video call). “In the mountain were normal people faced with terrible situations. In the place we were, there was no democracy. I just told all the people around me what was my idea. Coincidentally, other people had the same idea.”
Of course, Canessa has had 50 years of people taking the “simplistic approach”, one partly fostered by an earlier film, 1993 Hollywood yarn Alive, that he and his teammates “saved yourself because you ate the dead people”. He shakes his head.
**Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2023/12/20/the-horrific-true-story-behind-society-of-the-snow/**
If you haven’t read *Miracle in the Andes*, it’s a great read. People, of course, have such a morbid curiosity about how they survived but you can tell the questions really bother the survivors.
They received blessings from the families of those whose bodies sustained them, which I’m sure is the closest form of comfort and forgiveness they will ever have. I couldn’t imagine.
Last Podcast on the Left is covering this right now with Part 1 out now. It’s really good
Wasn’t this already a movie???
The crash scene in Alive, imo, is the scariest crash scene ever filmed.
If I was dead and my body could sustain the lives of my friends so they could return to their loved ones, I would say bon appetit!
The Dark Compakt of the Sea or Custom of the Sea (an unwritten code of sailors in Britains decaying merchant marine fleet which is denied to this day) which detailed how to choose and dispatch unlucky souls so that they might give life to their comrades as well as selecting the one charged with doing the dark deed shows it was an accepted practice even if taboo to acknowledge.