Venice International Film Festival has announced which film will be closing the event in September.
La Sociedad de la nieve (‘Society of the Snow’), a story of survival in extreme conditions, will be screened on Saturday 9 September in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema at the Lido di Venezia – the screening to be held after the Festival’s awards are handed out.
The film is directed by J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, The Impossible) and tells the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 which, in 1972, had been chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, and crashed in the heart of the Andes.
Only 29 of its 45 passengers survived the accident. Trapped in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on the planet, they had to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.
The cast of the film includes Enzo Vogrincic, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Esteban Kukuriczka and Tomas Wolf.
The screenplay is by J.A. Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego from the novel by Pablo Vierci. International distribution will be via Netflix.
Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona made his directorial debut with The Orphanage (2007) at Cannes, with the film winning numerous awards including seven Goyas.
His follow-up, The Impossible (2012) saw him enter English-language cinema winning five Goyas including Best Director. Additional credits include A Monster Calls (2016), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018); Executive producer of Marrowbone (2017) and I Hate New York (2018).
On television, Bayona’s also directed episodes of Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022). Society of the Snow is his fifth feature film, and his first to be shot in Spanish in sixteen years.