[Source: BBC]

A survivor of a plane crash in the Andes, where the living resorted to cannibalism while waiting to be rescued, has said a film about it made him “smell the experience all over again”.

Society of the Snow is the latest telling of a story that caused an international media frenzy in December 1972, when it emerged that 16 young men had survived Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571’s crash.

They had to survive in a remote, snow-covered part of the Andes for 72 days.

A few days after their rescue, the world also learned what the men had done to survive their hunger.

Now 70 years old, and a motivational speaker, Carlitos Páez was the youngest survivor of the crash, marking his 19th birthday in the mountains.

He was part of the Old Christians Club rugby team, who were flying from Uruguay to Chile for a match, with 45 crew and passengers on board.

“The director brought me to that place again with the film,” Páez says of watching the film, directed by JA Bayona, for the first time.

“Jay really took me there, he even brought back the smell of the experience. I felt everything like I was in the Andes 51 years ago.”

Such a sensational survival story has resulted in several documentaries about it over the last half century, as well as the 1993 Hollywood film Alive, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke.

But Society of the Snow is a Spanish-language movie, made on an epic scale by Bayona.

He’s previously directed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as well as The Impossible, starring Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland, set during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Páez appears on screen for a few minutes playing his own father, and the director also cast mainly young Uruguayan and Argentinian actors.

The film is based upon Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book Society of the Snow, which features interviews with survivors of the crash.

Bayona also conducted his own interviews with them, as well as with the families of those who died.

Although most of the movie was filmed in the mountains of Spain, some scenes were shot in the Valley of Tears in the Andes, where the accident happened.