ShareThis"Stranded" delicately deals with the signature detail from the 1972 crash that stranded a rugby team in the Andes Mountains. They were forced to use some of their dead friends as food during their excruciating 72-day exile.
But the movie allows the survivors to explain, in their own words and with eloquence and religious conviction, how and why they came to that decision. They compare it to a "very intimate communion," much as Jesus shared his body and blood.
They knew they were confronting mental, cultural and religious taboos, even as the struggle for food represented just a fraction of their ordeal. They needed warmth, water, order and, most of all, hope that they would be found.
They also wrestled with the arbitrary nature of what happened to them.
Roberto Canessa, 19 at the time of the crash and one of the standouts of the documentary, wonders how some travelers could be killed and others escape with a black eye. "You, yes. But you, no. How does destiny work?"
When they set off from Montevideo, Uruguay, for Santiago, Chile, the passengers were giddy with anticipation and happiness. It was spring, the players had heard Chile was "dirt cheap" and thought it would be thrilling to fly over the Andes and, until then, most had led peaceful, pleasant lives.
Later, when the plane flew into a storm and one of the crew blithely said, "Get ready to dance a bit," a woman reminded her husband it was Friday the 13th. He scolded her for being superstitious, but a wag who grabbed the microphone had no idea what would follow his morbid humor.
After the plane hit an air pocket, he quipped: "Tighten your seat belts. Must not let the corpses scatter."
Filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon, a childhood friend of many of the rugby players, uses re-enactments, archival footage, a return to the crash site known as "The Valley of Tears" and new interviews to give moviegoers a sense of what transpired on that fateful October day and the subsequent weeks.
Not everyone who survived the crash made it out alive; an avalanche later claimed eight. "I wondered about God," one man acknowledges. "How could he kill them all, make them suffer, make them eat their friends and then kill them?"
When two of them walked what turned out to be 44 miles for help, they navigated some peaks 13,000 feet high in rugby boots. They had none of the fancy clothing, gear, gadgets or maps available to mountaineers today.
Canessa, who made that final miraculous expedition with 20-year-old Fernando "Nando" Parrado, recalls, "You get stuck. You curse. You hate everything and yet you get up and start going again."
It is the ultimate inspirational story, a triumph of will and life over what seemed like certain death and despair.
Director Arijon concentrates on the crash and its immediate aftermath. He includes footage of a newsman asking, "How did you survive? What did you eat?," along with a pair of later headlines, one of which states, "Crash Victims' Cannibalism Reported."
What he fails to do is devote time to how the survivors (who are portrayed as being respectful of the dead) handled the subsequent media storm and where their lives took them.
Canessa, for instance, sounds like a physician, and an Internet search reveals he became a pediatric cardiologist and motivational speaker. That's the sort of information that could be shoehorned into the closing credits but isn't.
"Stranded" nevertheless is a remarkable story of survival, fellowship and faith that is about more than the obvious and the unthinkable.
Rating: Not rated. Due to content, suitable for mature teens. In Spanish with English subtitles.
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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