He has dealt with disasters on an epic scale before, both manmade, in the case of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and natural, with 2012’s Tsunami weepie The Impossible, and now J. A. Bayona is returning to orchestrating chaos for real-life Netflix’s Spanish-language survival tale Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve).
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bayona will return to Spanish-language filmmaking for the first time in 14 years to tell the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which in 1972 was chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile and catastrophically crashed on a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash and, finding themselves in one of the world’s toughest environments, they were forced to resort to extreme measures — including cannibalism — to stay alive.
In an official Netflix statement Bayona said “It was during the documentation process for The Impossible that I discovered Society of the Snow, Pablo Vierci’s fascinating chronicle about the tragedy of the Andes. More than ten years later, my fascination for the novel remains intact and I am happy to face the challenge that lies ahead: To tell one of the most remembered events of the 20th century, with all the complexity that implies a story that gives so much relevance to the survivors as well as to those who never returned from the mountains. I also face it in Spanish, a language that I excitedly return to after 14 years without filming in my own language, and with a team of young Uruguayan and Argentine actors, whom I’m totally thrilled with.”
Written by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego, Society of the Snow is based on the book La sociedad de la nieve by Pablo Vierci and tells the same story depicted in Frank Marshall’s 1993 Ethan Hawke starring survival film Alive.
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