Produced by J.A. Bayona, Netflix Documentary Series ‘Beyond Society’ Examines What Happens After the Survivors of the 1972 Andes Plane Crash Return to Uruguay

The Netflix documentary series “Beyond Society” (“Más Allá de la Sociedad”) had its world premiere at the San Sebastián International Film Festival on September 23. The three-part doc series, created by Juan Antonio Bayona (“Society of the Snow,” “The Impossible,” “A Monster Calls”) and Carlos Torres (“Pajares & CIA,” “Crims”), picks up where Bayona’s film “Society of the Snow” ends.

“Through the creative process and all the research required for ‘Society of the Snow,’ Juan Antonio had come across many stories and felt that something was still beating, which was the story of what happened after the rescue. So what was clear to us was that our story begins where the others always end: with the rescue of the survivors. Another point is how cinema can end up changing memory and how fiction can impact reality,” said Carlos Torres at a press conference held before the premiere in San Sebastián.

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J.A. Bayona’s 2023 film, “Society of the Snow,” recounts the story of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes Mountains, where 16 of the 45 people onboard were able to survive by resorting to cannibalism. To date, it is the most-watched film on streaming across all of Europe.

The new documentary spans the last 50-plus years in Carrasco, Uruguay, where the families of both the dead and the living have had to co-exist.

“Our intention with the series was to go up to the mountain and leave it buried there. We wanted to close a very long but very beautiful journey. Beyond the film, which ended the moment they were rescued, there was another kind of survival, which was returning home and surviving, on the part of the survivors, and surviving the loss of a loved one. And something I’m very interested in, which is reflected in the documentary, is when reality is mixed with fiction, how all that pain and suffering can become stories we tell ourselves,” Bayona said at the press conference.

Interviewing some of the living survivors, the relatives of the deceased and the journalists who covered the story, the series illustrates the emotional toll the tragedy took on the small Uruguayan town of Carrasco, where both the survivors and the deceased were from. The accident caused a rift between the families of the living and the dead. The series examines how being able to tell one’s version of the story can change the way one faces it.

For some, it was a celebratory return of the people they thought they’d lost. For others, the media frenzy and the return of the survivors were a constant reminder of having lost their loved ones.

“We can’t shy away from difficult stories. We had to understand that we were telling the story of 45 families. You can’t always please everyone, but we had to find the essence of each of their pain, their way of life, and understand that nobody survived everything and nobody died from it, and 54 years later we’re still talking about it,” added Torres.

“Listening to and understanding the person in front of you, trying to understand why they behaved as they did. Grief is very personal, very subjective. We had to understand how each person manages pain, since pain is also very subjective. An event can cause great pain to one person while another copes with it much better. All forms of grief are valid, and the beautiful thing about this story is that in the end there was finally a reunification between the two sides. For me especially, as a film director, I liked that it was brought about by fiction, little by little, as I said, through the passing of the years, the generational change, finding a voice for everyone who was there. That finally allowed people who hadn’t talked about the tragedy in 50 years to be able to understand each other, to put themselves in the other’s shoes, and finally come together, like what we experienced when we screened the film in Montevideo,” added Bayona.

“I think that looking at the past is a shock, it’s like a mirror, confronting yourself with who you are, with what you have become. I’m often asked, what if this tragedy had happened in the age of social media? I think human beings are the same with or without social media. It was 1972 and it was a huge story. I don’t think we make documentaries to give lessons, but sometimes it’s about learning. I imagine you can always learn by looking at how things were handled, and not repeat those same mistakes,” said Torres.

“We tried to understand the point of view and behavior of everyone involved in this story over the last 50 years, and doing that was one of the driving forces for us to make this series, to be able to show how fiction has been making its way into this story, which is surely one of the first media tragedies in our society, since it was covered by the whole world. We told the story hoping that our work could give meaning to the tragedy,” concluded Bayona.

“Beyond the Snow” is directed by Torres and produced by Bayona, Belén Atienza (“Society of the Snow,” “The Impossible”) and Sandra Hermida (“Society of the Snow,” “Three Goodbyes”). It will be available on Netflix on December 18.