Stranded: Self-preservation: Endurance, Unity and the Breaking of a Taboo

With “Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains,” there could be emerging a cottage industry of film disasters on
mountains requiring reenactments. Its predecessor is Touching the Void, a
story of rescue and escape from death told by the mountain climbers who lived
through an impossible experience. They sit before the cameras and relate
a death-defying climb as narration for the footage depicting what seems to be
pure fiction.

“Stranded” relates what a traveling rugby team and their relatives did to sustain
an airplane crash on a remote Andean glacier at the height of winter and, similarly,
defy death for 72 days. Sixteen of the 45 passengers returned, and here tell of
the events from their point of view. We hear of the particular anguish and
fears each survivor went through, as we watch archival footage and
reenactments so well staged and portrayed that it makes one wonder how they
did it. The impression of reality is such that the filmmaking team had to
deal with some suffering in depicting the story. The result is as much
a testament to documentary filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon’s excellent story
structure as it is to extreme human drama.

Starting with the joy of anticipation on the team’s day of departure, Arijon moves to the youthful exuberance on the plane in the early part of the journey that turns to dread as their craft enters unstable weather over the snow-filled mountains. Then, the horror of crash landing when the engines weren’t powerful enough to ascend over an upcoming peak. The nightmare begins. The fact of having survived so long–well after the plane’s store of food will have been exhausted–raises the question of extremes. On the one hand the scandal of crossing the line of a major human taboo, cannibalism and, on the other, the miracle of survival against the extreme odds themselves.

In the final analysis, I think most would agree, you can only identify with these people’s plight and condone the necessities of self preservation. In 1973 the issue turned into Alive, a documentary non-fiction bestseller. Later, in 1993, a movie based on the book and starring Ethan Hawke was released. But Arijon, a childhood friend of the survivors who, after all, were all home-town boys from Montevideo, Uruguay, didn’t think the account was complete. With the benefit of still-vivid memories, he returns to it thirty years later and presents the full picture, with all the harrowing details of shifting physical, mental and spiritual adaptations to meet the changing conditions as expressed by those who came out of it alive.

One of the survivors’ main points (and justification for the film) is their universal agreement that it was sustained unity that made survival for so long possible. This was a team that lived up to what may be the most challenging test of the concept that one could imagine.