Premiering at San Sebastián, the three-part documentary series features the survivors, the relatives of those who perished in the Andes and the journalists who covered the story that reverberated around the world 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. 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. 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. 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 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. Grief is very personal, very subjective.
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