Into Thin Air and Back

Thirty-six years after the fact, most of us have at least some knowledge of the subject of Uruguayan filmmaker Gonzalo Arijón's doc Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. The 1972 headline story of the disappearance into the Andes of a plane carrying the 45-member entourage of a Santiago-bound Uruguayan high school rugby team and the astounding rescue, 72 days later, of 16 survivors has been recounted in Piers Paul Read's 1974 bestselling book, Alive, and in the 1993 film of the same name, starring Ethan Hawke. The memory-prompt here will probably always be that the 16 survivors of the crash achieved survivor status – well after the search for the plane had been abandoned – by consuming the flesh of those who had died in the accident.

Arijón, a boyhood friend of some of the survivors and a resident of Paris for the past 30 years, decided that on the auspicious 30th anniversary of the tragedy with a miraculous ending, an essential dimension of the story remained unexplored: the thoughtful, philosophical, and spiritual reminiscences of the survivors. Interviews with these men, now middle-aged, conducted at the scene of the crash, the Valley of Tears (sans snow), reveal both what they felt then and how they feel 30 years later. We hear their first-person accounts of the trauma of the initial crash, followed by an avalanche that took the lives of still more of their group; their discovery of a functioning radio, which cruelly allowed them to follow the progress and subsequent abandonment of their own rescue by the authorities; and their many forays away from the crash site in failed attempts to be discovered. Particularly harrowing in an already harrowing ordeal was that of their final rescue – thanks to the death-defying mission of two of the group, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa. Two months following the crash, these two, deemed the most fit of the group, were fed extra rations and deployed on an extended mission for help into the Andes – a last-ditch effort. Miraculously, they managed to keep going for 10 days, walking 44 miles over 13,000-foot, snow-covered summits until they spotted a Chilean shepherd in a valley, across a torrential river, and were able to flag his attention. The shepherd threw the two men, whom he described later as "smelling of the grave," a piece of paper and a pen wrapped in a handkerchief. They identified themselves and immediately led a rescue team by helicopter to the others.

Arijón's film downplays the fact that the survivors had stayed alive by eating the flesh of the dead – a revelation that was sensational at the time it was made at a press conference shortly after the rescue. Instead, we learn from the mostly Catholic survivors that many of them continue to believe, as they did at the time, that this seemingly unthinkable taboo decision was akin to a form of Holy Communion. They remain convinced that their survival, when so many others perished, is as inexplicable as it was miraculous.

Stranded tells its story using interviews of the survivors supplemented by impressionistic and realistic re-enactments of the events leading up to the rescue three days before Christmas in 1972. There are only two actual photos used in the film. Although the re-creations are done quite well, it can be somewhat confusing – particularly with a subtitled film – to separate the real from the reimagined.

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The AFS Documentary Tour presents Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 7pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz. Tickets are $4 for AFS members and $6 for the general public. For more information, visit www.austinfilm.org.