“We achieved the most important thing, that the public felt the film ‘The Snow Society’ was theirs,” recognized as a great winner of the Goya Awards and a finalist at the Hollywood Oscars.
This is how the Uruguayan journalist and writer has summarized Pablo Vierci his book, a work published in 2009 that survivors consider the best that has been written about their history. It provides a detailed narrative covering from the initial impact of the accident to the difficult decisions they had to make.
The Paúles de Salamanca University Residence has served to learn, with the help of Tribuna Grupo, how their experience was written after numerous interviews with the survivors of the plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. The event was presented by its general director, Felix Angel Carreras, with an auditorium packed to the brim.
“Being in Salamanca is an honor,” Vierci began by saying. “This is a story that is 52 years old., is old, but it had many edges to tell, the soul was missing. The main transmission belt is young people. “I am attentive to what people give us with these types of inspiring stories.”
“Being in those mountains is being in the middle of nowhere, a journey that leads you to ask the deepest questionswith death on its heels. “You don’t want to be saddened by the tragedy, but rather seek inspiration.”.
Pablo’s closeness to all of them, classmates and friends from class and school in Montevideo (Uruguay), gave them the confidence they needed to ‘undress’ and tell their particular tragedy, when their plane crashed in the mountain range and they were left for dead. .
To tell it, he says that he had two things clear: he had to climb the mountain and stay at the accident site as long as possible; and that all survivors had to participate. It was not easy because many of them had not only never given an interview, but they also distanced themselves from the accident as much as they could.
“Compassion and mercy, We created a torch that we now leave in the hands of young people who now have to formulate the same dilemmas.” Vierci came to the book because he was a schoolmate of these young people, “because he has had a love for writing since he was a child.”
“When they arrived I thought… who is going to tell it? Nando Parrado asked me to help him, they came from death. When I saw them they were inside a capsule, they came from an experience that transforms you. That capsule It dissipated over time.”
Regarding José Antonio Bayona, he assured that “to this day I have not met anyone like him, with that caliber not only on a professional level, but also as a human being. He has extreme kindness.”
The film has a duration of two hours and twenty-four minutes, but 500 hours were shot. “Netflix gave us the possibility of recording in Spanish, until then it had never been possible. The most terrible thing about all this is that no one would have been able to tell this story. “If they hadn’t come back, we would still be waiting today for a knock on the door one day.”
“The story had a tragic ending, but it had an ending. Each one of them internally keeps a very personal story of everything they experienced during the days in which the world declared them missing, until their collaborative work in the mountains, their ingenuity and their values, gave them the opportunity to return to life. life when they were rescued after an adventure of almost two weeks in search of the civilization in which they participated Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa.
“The film has been healing. The relatives of those who died realized the hardships they went through. They all went through unspeakable things, which allowed them to put themselves in each other’s shoes.” Surely, “there are things that stay for them.”
Pablo Vierci highlighted today in Salamanca the capacity of ‘The Snow Society’, the Netflix film, of which he is an associate producer, as well as the book of the same name, of which he is the author, to inspire not only the 250 million people who have seen the film, a candidate for the Oscars, but to “the young generations, of the 21st century, under 24 years old, with a history in which the key is brotherhood, friendship, dedication.”
