11/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The Spanish helmer delves into the intricacies of his new project, telling the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes in 1972

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

JA Bayona’s follow-up to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom [+see also:
trailer
film profile] can come across as a jarring choice, but for quite a while, the Spanish director had been wanting to tell the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes in 1972, as documented in Pablo Vierci’s book La sociedad de la nieve. Society of the Snow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: JA Bayona
film profile], the closing film of the 80th Venice Film Festival, does not skimp on the details of the fear and terror endured by those involved, telling of the near-impossible survival of 29 (out of the 45) rugby-player passengers who had to face uninhabitable environments for 72 days. Cineuropa spoke to Bayona about the intricacies of his new project.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: What is it about “man versus nature” narratives that make them so potent?
JA Bayona: I knew this story of the 1972 Andes plane crash already. I knew the facts, but not all of the implications that the story had. These I discovered in Pablo Vierci’s book, especially that old theme related to the character of Numa [Enzo Vogrincic], who has to give up all his previous beliefs and adjust to the rules of the mountain: one has to accept one’s own shadow side. In a way, all of them find in nature their most truthful part, and perhaps they find the courage to accept it.

This story, like every tale of survival, can be both heroic and tragic. How do these opposites fit into your storytelling approach? You’ve tackled this before in The Impossible [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Juan Antonio Bayona
film profile].
What was interesting for me was the presence of the dead in the book. It tells the story of the survivors, but there’s this constant presence of death. Additionally, the survivors were not feeling at ease with the image that they were given – that they were the heroes; rather, they thought the heroes were those who did not come back. Such underlying tensions were useful in order to dismantle the myth of hope for the hero and to portray something more human. There were those who did a lot and did not come back, and then there were those who did nothing and still came back.

What’s curious is the three degrees of separation: the survivors figure in Pablo Vierci’s book, and you work with the book as source material. Was this distance helpful in any way when making the film?
I also interviewed survivors because I wanted to hear their first-hand experience. While we were in agreement with Pablo about how the story would be told, there were sometimes subtle differences between their testimonies and the book. In these cases, we were looking for the common denominator. There is this quote in the film, “You have to go back to the past, knowing that the past is the thing that changes the most,” because one person had one story, and another person had a different story. So when we found four or five people who agreed on a certain thing, then we saw that that was something that was held in common.

As for the aesthetics, it’s only natural to shoot landscapes with very wide lenses, but why use a similar tool to depict faces?
Because a certain part of these landscapes is made of their faces! When the avalanche traps them underground, in their memories, the men recalled that that was the worst moment of all for them. But this is also when they become a group. So, the shots from then on reflect them as a group, which was important because each one was as important as the others. Then, the form reflects and conveys the content of the scene.

Finally, what about the scene where the survivors decide to take photographs amidst the debris from the crash? At that moment, the film makes the invisible visible. Is there something in this desire to capture even the worst conditions in an image, which connects to the role of cinema as a witness to something that we cannot see by ourselves?
Yes, and before that, there is a scene where a black silhouette is seen against the white background, and there, I think there is this idea of a vacuum, the lack of meaning in life, or at least in one’s old life. Those who go up to the mountain, they try to find their own meaning to fill this void. In the same way, I’d say that, through fiction, we try to find meaning and give meaning to reality. Similarly, photographs talk about that. And behind them, there is also the thought: “What are they going to think about us, stuck in the mountains?”