The Oscar campaign for Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) is in full swing, and director J.A. Bayona has called in all his friends to help him promote the film. That includes superstar actor Tom Holland, who moderated a panel including Bayona, real-life survivor Roberto Canessa, and Enzo Vogrincic, who plays Numa Turcatti.
The movie, which chronicles the story of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972, and the way 16 people survived for 72 days stuck in the Andes, is on the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards. It has been a ratings success for Netflix, making the Top 10 all-time for non-English language movies in only 11 days, with approximately 51 million views.
Holland and Bayona go way back. Holland’s first big role was in Bayona’s other disaster movie, The Impossible, which came out in 2012. It was during research for The Impossible that Bayona came upon the book Society of the Snow by Pablo Vierci, which is the basis for this movie.
During the panel, Bayona and Holland even discuss how the director used to read pages of the book to the actors during the filming of The Impossible, because it gave them “the inner life of the characters,” something Bayona considered essential.
Also during the panel, Roberto Canessa, who alongside Nando Parrado climbed 15,260 feet and walked for approximately 38 miles and 10 days to seek help, spoke about the differences between the book Alive, published in 1974, and the Society of the Snow book this movie is based on. “[Alive] was a very neat book that had all the details about what had happened in the mountain. But the survivors said that book was missing the feelings, that it was missing the soul of what happened.”
Watch the full panel below.
Society of the Snow is now available on Netflix.