First “Society of the Snow” Trailer Reveals J.A. Bayona’s Decade-in-the-Making Survival Epic
The first trailer for J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow has arrived, revealing a glimpse at Bayona’s take on one of the most notorious aviation disasters and stories of survival of all time, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972 that was carrying a rugby team. The plane crashed in the Andes, with only 29 out of 45 passengers surviving. For those who made it onto the ground alive, their challenges were only beginning, as the brutal high Andean environment pushed them to their limits and forced the survivors into making some heartbreaking decisions to carry on. Their story was previously dramatized in director Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive, which starred Ethan Hawke.
Bayona directs from a script he co-wrote with Nicolás Casariego, Jamie Marques-Olearraga, and Bernat Vilaplana, based on a book by Pablo Vierci. Spain has already chosen Society of Snow for entry for this year’s Best International Film Oscar.
The film has been a decade in the making for Bayona, who was determined to film it in Spanish with an unknown cast. “It was important to be as close to reality as possible,” Bayona told IndieWire. “It was also important to have a cast that will speak using their accents, an unknown cast, because the more unknown the faces were, the more realistic the approach will be.” The cast includes Enzo Vogrincic, Agustín Pardella, Matías Recalt, Esteban Bigliardi, Diego Vegezzi, Fernando Contigiani García, Esteban Kukuriczka, Rafael Federman, Francisco Romero, Valentino Alonso, Tomás Wolf, Agustín Della Corte, Felipe Otaño, Andy Pruss, Blas Polidori, Felipe Ramusio, and Simón Hempe.
Bayona got experience shooting major blockbusters—Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and two episodes of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—which gave him the large-scale chops he needed to complete this incredibly difficult shoot. “We thought we were going to be shooting this much sooner,” Bayona told IndieWire. “But this is the journey. And what we shot in Hollywood allowed us to to be shooting Society of the Snow the way we wanted to do it.”
Check out the trailer below. Society of the Snow hits select theaters in December, then Netflix on January 4.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In 1972, the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, catastrophically crashes 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 are forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.
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Featured image: Society of the Snow – Production Still Image. Courtesy Netflix.
