Bayona Turns Lens on Andes Survivors' Return in Netflix Doc

The three-part Netflix documentary series "Beyond Society" ("Más Allá de la Sociedad") premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival on September 23. Created by Juan Antonio Bayona ("Society of the Snow," "The Impossible," "A Monster Calls") and Carlos Torres ("Pajares & CIA," "Crims"), it arrives on Netflix on December 18.

The series picks up exactly where Bayona's 2023 film "Society of the Snow" ends. That feature recounted the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes Mountains, in which 16 of the 45 people onboard survived by resorting to cannibalism. To date, it is the most-watched film on streaming across all of Europe.

"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," Torres told a press conference before the San Sebastián premiere. "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."

The documentary spans more than 50 years in Carrasco, Uruguay, the small town where both the survivors and the deceased came from, and where their families have had to coexist ever since. Interviewing living survivors, relatives of the deceased and the journalists who covered the story, the series charts the emotional toll of the tragedy. The accident caused a rift between the families of the living and the dead. For some, the survivors' return was a celebration of people they thought lost. For others, the media frenzy and that same return served as a constant reminder of the loved ones who never came back.

"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," Bayona said at the press conference. "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."

Torres emphasized the scale of the responsibility. "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."

Bayona described the production as an exercise in listening. "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."

The director credits fiction itself with helping bring about that reconciliation. "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," he said. "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."

Torres framed the series as a confrontation with the past rather than a history lesson. "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," he said. "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."

Bayona closed by situating the crash within media history. "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," he said. "We told the story hoping that our work could give meaning to the tragedy."

Torres directs the series. Bayona produces alongside Belén Atienza ("Society of the Snow," "The Impossible") and Sandra Hermida ("Society of the Snow," "Three Goodbyes"). With "Society of the Snow" already Europe's most-streamed film, the December 18 release will test whether audiences are as ready to watch the aftermath of the Andes disaster as they were the disaster itself.