Society of the Snow: Real Story vs Movie Accuracy

On October 13, 1972, a chartered plane carrying a young Uruguayan rugby team crashed deep in the frozen Andes mountains, stranding 45 people without winter gear or food. Director J.A. Bayona’s Oscar-nominated film Society of the Snow (La sociedad de la nieve) brought this miraculous 72-day survival story back to global attention with staggering realism. While earlier Hollywood adaptations leaned into sensational drama, Bayona worked directly with the real survivors and the families of those who died to reconstruct the truth with unmatched historical precision.

Flight 571 vs The Screen

The crash sequence in Society of the Snow is one of the most terrifying, physically violent depictions of aviation trauma ever filmed. How close was it to the real disaster?

It was almost identical to survivor testimony.

Survivors beside the crashed fuselage. Source: TIME

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a twin-engine Fairchild FH-227D, was carrying 40 passengers — members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, their friends, and family — along with 5 crew members from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile. Heavy mountain weather forced an overnight stop in Mendoza, Argentina.

When they resumed flight the next afternoon, the co-pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Lagurara, made a fatal navigational error. Flying through dense cloud cover on instrument rules, he miscalculated the aircraft’s ground speed against strong headwinds. Believing he had already cleared the Andes and reached Curicó, Chile, he began a premature descent.

When the aircraft dropped below the clouds, the pilots suddenly found themselves staring directly at a sheer mountain face. Despite full throttle, the tail clipped an 11,500-foot ridge, followed immediately by the right and left wings being shorn off by rocky outcrops.

What the movie captures with horrifying accuracy is the accordion effect. When the fuselage hit the steep glacial slope of the Valle de las Lágrimas (Valley of Tears) at roughly 220 mph, the aircraft behaved like a toboggan until it suddenly slammed into a snowbank.

The deceleration tore the passenger seats from their floor tracks. Rows of bolted metal seats compressed forward like an accordion, crushing legs, pelvises, and chests against the forward bulkhead.

• Twelve people died instantly or within minutes of the impact.
• Five more died overnight from catastrophic blood loss and internal injuries.
• Fernando “Nando” Parrado suffered a severe skull fracture and fell into a deep coma; his fellow passengers initially believed he was dead and left him in the colder rear of the plane, a circumstance that likely reduced his brain swelling and saved his life.

Numa Turcatti: why the movie chose a fallen hero

Most Hollywood survival films center on the triumphant heroes who hike out and save the day. Bayona made a radically different narrative choice: he handed the voice and emotional core of the film to Numa Turcatti, played by Enzo Vogrincic.

Who was Numa in real life?

Numa was a 24-year-old law student. Unlike many on board, he did not play for the Old Christians rugby team; his close friends Gastón Costemalle and Pancho Delgado persuaded him to join the trip for a cheap weekend getaway to Chile. Despite being an “outsider” to the core athletic club, Numa quickly became the backbone of the entire group.

Numa’s death on December 11, 1972 was the breaking point for the survivors. He was universally loved for his kindness, his quiet determination, and his refusal to give up.

In his final days, unable to walk, Numa slipped a piece of paper into the hands of his companions bearing a Bible verse: “No hay amor más grande que dar la vida por los amigos” (“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”).

His passing removed any lingering hesitation. The remaining survivors realized that waiting on the glacier meant certain death. The very next morning, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa began their final trek across the mountain range.

Memorial cross at the crash site. Source: Luciana Paoloni / Getty Images

The harsh science of high-altitude starvation

Could you survive two months at 12,000 feet with nothing to eat? The medical and physiological reality on the glacier was gruesome.

The human body consumes roughly 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day just to maintain basal metabolic function. In subzero temperatures where nighttime readings regularly plunged to -30°C (-22°F), shivering to generate warmth burned through that energy twice as fast.

Here is how the group adapted to their extreme environment:

1. Melting Snow for Water: Eating raw snow freezes your core and burns more calories than it hydrates you. The survivors fashioned makeshift solar water basins out of flat aluminum sheets pulled from behind the cabin seats, using the intense mountain sun to melt snow into wine bottles.
2. Combating Snow Blindness: High-altitude UV rays reflecting off white snow can burn the cornea. Adolfo “Fito” Strauch engineered custom sunglasses using tinted plastic sheets salvaged from the pilot’s cockpit sun visors, sewing them to cloth strips.
3. The Unspoken Pact: By Day 10, all plane snacks (a few chocolate bars, crackers, and bottles of wine) were gone. Facing absolute organ failure, the group held agonizing debates. Led by medical students Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino, they made a collective agreement: if any of us dies, the others have full permission to use our bodies for food so someone might make it home.
4. Physical Deterioration: The film accurately depicts dark brown or black urine among the survivors. This was caused by myoglobinuria and acute dehydration — the body was breaking down its own muscle tissue for protein, dumping toxic metabolic byproducts into the kidneys.

The Avalanche: The trapped nightmare of day 17

If the plane crash was the first disaster, the avalanche of October 29, 1972 was the psychological low point of the entire 72 days.

Just as the survivors were settling into a stable daily routine inside the patched-up fuselage, a wall of snow broke loose from the glacier above. It slammed into the fuselage while everyone was sleeping, burying the entire cabin in seconds.

• Eight people died instantly, suffocated beneath packed snow.
• Among the dead was Marcelo Pérez del Castillo, the charismatic rugby team captain who had organized the group’s hierarchy, rationed the early supplies, and kept morale alive.
• Also killed was Liliana Methol, the only surviving woman left on the mountain, who had served as a comforting maternal figure to the young men.

The survivors remained completely buried alive inside the cramped, pitch-black metal tube for nearly three days.

With almost no oxygen, someone managed to jam a metal pole through the ceiling up into the fresh air, allowing just enough ventilation to prevent suffocation. When they finally dug their way out through the cockpit window on the third day, a raging blizzard forced them right back inside — with the bodies of their newly fallen friends.

The final hike: Canessa, Parrado, and the Mountain wall

In most survival movies, heroes conquer nature with high-tech gear and steady energy. Society of the Snow portrays the trek as it truly was: a slow, agonizing, oxygen-deprived stumble up a wall of sheer ice.

On December 12, 1972, three young men set off: Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa, and Antonio “Tintín” Vizintín. They carried a large sleeping bag hand-sewn by Javier Methol and Roberto using insulation padding from the plane’s tail, waterproof nylon, and copper wire.

When they reached the towering summit on Day 3, expecting to see the green valleys of Chile, they were met with a crushing sight: endless rows of snow-covered peaks extending in every direction.

They realized they were much deeper inside the mountain range than the co-pilot had claimed.

• Recognizing their food supplies would not support three men, Tintín Vizintín voluntarily surrendered his rations and slid back down the mountain to the fuselage on an aircraft cushion, saving his friends’ lives by conserving food.
• Parrado and Canessa pushed onward for seven more days, descending along the melting waters of the Río Azufre until the snow turned to rock, moss, and eventually green pasture.

Roberto Canessa (left) and Nando Parrado (right) after rescue. Source: Evening Standard / Getty Images

Meeting the horseman: the note on the rock

On December 20, 1972, exhausted and suffering from advanced malnutrition, Canessa spotted a man on horseback on the opposite side of a roaring river. That man was Sergio Catalán, a Chilean arriero (muleteer).

Because the river was too loud for shouting, Catalán took a piece of paper, wrapped it around a stone with a piece of string, and hurled it across the water.

Nando Parrado scribbled back the message that would break the story to the entire world:

“Vengo de un avión que cayó en las montañas. Soy uruguayo. Hace 10 días que estamos caminando… En el avión quedan 14 personas heridas. Tenemos que salir rápido de aquí y no sabemos cómo. No tenemos comida. Estamos débiles. ¿Cuándo nos van a buscar arriba? Por favor, no podemos ni caminar. ¿Dónde estamos?”
(“I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for 10 days… In the plane, 14 injured people remain. We have to get out of here quickly and we don’t know how. We have no food. We are weak. When are you coming to get us? Please, we can’t even walk. Where are we?”)

Catalán threw bread across the river, rode his horse for hours to reach the nearest road, and alerted the Chilean Carabineros. Within hours, rescue helicopters were airborne.

What the movie got right vs what it changed

Bayona’s film is celebrated for its documentary-level fidelity, but filmmaking always demands some condensation. Here is how the movie measures up to the historical record:

The real survivor cameos you might have missed

One of the most touching aspects of Society of the Snow is how the real survivors and their families participated directly in production:

• Carlitos Páez plays his real-life father, the famous painter Carlos Páez Vilaró, reading the names of his surviving son and friends over the live radio broadcast.
• Nando Parrado opens the door of the airport terminal for the actor playing him early in the film.
• Roberto Canessa appears as the hospital physician who checks in the actor playing his younger self in Santiago.
• Joaquín de Freitas Turcatti (Numa’s real-life nephew) plays one of the rugby players at the start of the movie.

These cameos were not just Easter eggs. For the surviving men and the families of the victims in Montevideo, the production served as a collective memorial — honoring every single person who boarded Flight 571, living and dead alike.

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