Absorbing documentary restores dignity to the survivors of an Andean plane crash. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

IT’s enough make hardened cynics superstitious: a group of mostly 19-year-old Uruguayan rugby players coping with 72 days of unimaginably freezing conditions after their plane crashed in the Andes in the year of 1972, having set out on... you guessed it: Friday the 13th.

This extraordinary story of human endurance is relived through a combination of naturalistically set interviews with survivors – some taking place at or near the crash site – and verite-styled reconstruction of events. From the get-go, the doomed passengers are established as happy-go-lucky, largely God-fearing everypeople – albeit from a variety of different backgrounds – who are tremendously excited at the prospect of travelling to neighbouring Chile. Most had never flown before, so it’s nothing short of an extremely unpleasant experience to observe their jocularity (“this is fun – like riding bucking broncos”) when their plane begins to shudder violently and plummet towards rocky Andean peaks.

If the film’s utilisation of flickering edits is a jarring reminder of televisual techniques used in disaster docos and shows such as Final 24, it doesn’t divert attention away from what is a truly absorbing real-life saga. And make no mistake: this is a saga that will have you scratching your head for days afterward, trying to figure out how it would be humanly possible for these men to survive for 72 days in sub-zero temperatures; how two of the survivors managed to muster the strength to cross treacherous, storm-swept mountains on foot (without proper climbing equipment) in order to facilitate the rescue of their teammates; and, understandably, how the survivors came to the decision to eat the flesh of the dead passengers.

Ah, cannibalism. Ever done it? Thought not. Then allow me to ask the following question: if you had survived a plane crash over the Andes in bone-chillingly freezing weather, and were forced to make the choice whether to eat your dead flight companions, or suffer an agonisingly drawn-out death – what would you have done? It’s the classic corporeal Catch-22: eat to survive and face the interminable social stigmatisation of cannibalism; or die via starvation. What makes the story so compelling and hard-to-stomach – if you’ll excuse the pun – is that these were men just like you and me; neither easily gallow-sent pariahs nor capricious Darwinian wolves. That they chose to do the ‘unimaginable’ brought the practice of cannibalism away from torchfaced tales of tribal savagery to sit dangerously close to the realm of the everyday. It is important to note, however, that some survivors describe the situation as a re-ordering of societal priorities; a ‘primitive’ society quickly establishing its eminence, where ‘money was paper’, and civilised rules no longer necessarily applied.

Largely out of respect for the dead and their families, at no point do the survivors attempt to fully ‘exonerate’ themselves, though they do give several reasons for the choices they made. Some survivors attempt to qualify their deeds through religious analogy – one going so far as to liken the dead bodies to a reincarnated Jesus, divinely saving the day –, while others tend to take a more pragmatic, survivalist approach. In any case, writer-director Gonzalo Arijon respectfully chooses not to dwell too heavily on the issue; instead allowing the bare-bones rationale to be laid out by the survivors, without going into gruesome detail. It’s interesting to hear the cannibalism broken down into purely biological terms: the dead bodies a veritable source of much-needed protein, potassium and magnesium; some survivors even scraping human bones with broken glass in order to extract calcium. Sadly, the taboo surrounding events undoubtedly detracts from the remarkable ingenuity of the survivors – how many of us would have had the skills to make sleeping bags out of plane seats?

Ultimately, one cannot put oneself in the survivors’ shoes; yet it is a credit to their openness and humanity that they allow audiences to come to a greater understanding of what they had to overcome in order to stay alive. It is a film full of dignity and perseverant hope, providing a much-needed antidote to sinsationalised media portrayals of tragic circumstances.