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"No matter what."

Elizabeth x Margaret » The Crown 6x08 Ritz

#cries forever

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More photos from behind the scenes

Agustin Pardella, Matías Recalt, Roberto Canessa, Tino Canessa (Roberto's son) and Andy Pruss.

Fun fact: Roy Harley, played by Andy, is Roberto's brother-in-law (their wives are sisters).

Here's Roy and Andy:

Gustavo Zerbino, Agustin Pardella and Nando Parrado:

Benjamin Segura, who played Vasco Echavarren, with Vasco's sisters (the shortest sister looks a lot like Vasco):

Fernando Contigiani, who played Arturo Nogueira, with Arturo's brother (he looks exactly like Arturo 🥹 it's emotional to imagine what he would look like had he survived):

Fito Strauch and Esteban Kukuczka:

Alvaro Mangino and Juan Caruso:

Coche Inciarte and Simon Hempe:

Rocco Posca and Moncho Sabella:

2 Coches + 2 Carlitos:

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On this day in 1972, two helicopters arrived in the Valley of Tears, where the severed fuselage and 14 survivors waited for rescue

Drawing by survivor Coche Inciarte

Nando and Roberto were shown maps and asked to point out where the rest of the survivors were. When they did, the rescuers said "That can't be it! That's all the way in Argentina! You couldn't have crossed the Andes on foot!".

But Nando and Roberto insisted they knew what they were talking about.

Nando was in one of the helicopters, otherwise the rescue team would not have been able to locate the wreckage (the white plane could not be seen from above in the snowy scenery). That took amazing bravery, given what he had just gone through. Weather conditions weren't the best, so the helicopters shook and swayed.

Not all 14 could fit in both helicopters, so Pancho Delgado, Antonio Vinzintín, Moncho Sabella, Bobby François, Gustavo Zerbino, Fito Strauch, Roy Harley and Javier Methol stayed behind with three mountaineers and a nurse. Due to the weather, they were only rescued on the 23d.

from left to right: Fito, Gustavo, Bobby, Roy, Pancho and Moncho

Actual footage of the first group being taken care of in Los Maitenes:

Footage of the first arrivals in Los Maitenes (pay attention to the survivors hugging, specially Nando and Carlitos tumbling to the ground <3):

Footage of the second group arriving at the hospital:

#andes plane crash

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I just finished reading Nando’s book about his journey in the Andes and I highly recommend it for its honest retelling of those 72 days, and his personal experience dealing with them.

I wanted to share some quotes that truly made me appreciate his and Roberto’s friendship even more. He spares no words to define Roberto’s stubborn, competent and unique personality and that’s how you see they’re truly brothers.

“After seeing how Arturo and Rafael suffered at night as they lay on the floor of the plane (and bellowing at them fiercely to stop their pathetic moaning), Roberto spent hours the next morning fashioning the swinging hammocks that gave those two injured boys some relief from their pain. It was not compassion, exactly, that spurred him to do these things, it was more a sense of duty. He knew his gifts and abilities, and it simply made sense to him to do what he knew no one else could do.”

-

“But more than anything I wanted him with me simply because he was Roberto, the most determined and strong-willed person I had ever known. If there was anyone in our group who could stand up to the Andes through sheer stubbornness alone, Roberto was the one. ”

-

“Roberto was Roberto, on the field or off, and even in the middle of a hard-fought match, he refused to be told what to do.”

-

It reassured me that Roberto was becoming his grumbling self again.

-

“Roberto,” I said, “can you imagine how beautiful this would be if we were not dead men?” I felt his hand wrap around mine. He was the only person who understood the magnitude of what we had done and of what we still had to do. I knew he was as frightened as I was, but I drew strength from our closeness. We were bonded now like brothers. We made each other better men.”

-

“Roberto stood beside me. I saw the fear in his eyes, but I also saw the courage, and I instantly forgave him all the weeks of arrogance and bullheadedness. […]

Roberto nodded. “You and I are friends, Nando,” he said. “We have been through so much. Now let’s go die together.”

-

“He was forcing himself forward now through stubbornness and the sheer power of his will. As I watched him, I knew I had been right in choosing him as my traveling companion.”

-

“But no one has been a better brother to me than Roberto Canessa, my partner in that long trek through the Andes.”

-

“In that moment, neither of us trusted that we had any kind of future, but we did, and more than thirty years later I am proud to say that I am still best friends with Roberto, who has only grown more resourceful, more confident, and, yes, more hardheaded with the passage of time.”

-

I tease him mercilessly about his ego, but I would not have him any other way.

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“I wonder who these photos are for”

Check them out next to the originals!

#society of the snow

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Diego Vegezzi as Marcelo Pérez del Castillo in La Sociedad de la Nieve/Society of the Snow (2023)

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Agustín posted this and then Matías shared it on his story…

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"The Andes are huge. They'd have to organize the search in some way - like in zones. They were here yesterday. We saw them fly overhead. Today we heard them but didn't see them. I bet they're searching a different area." "That means they didn't see us." - La Sociedad de la Nieve/Society of the Snow (2023)

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why I'm happysad that they let Numa be the narrator in Society of the Snow.

So if you, like me, have been more than a little obsessed with the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 for a very, very long time, your stomach probably dropped like mine did when the narrator introduced himself as Numa Turcatti. (My immediate thought was, "why would you do this to us?!") If you went in blind, I feel for you!

But while the film gave us a version of Numa, since it's from his perspective what it doesn't really give us is the group's perspective on him. He comes across a bit like an outsider, and although, yes, his only surviving friend was Pancho Delgado, he wasn’t an outsider for long at all. On the contrary. So, here are a few excerpts from the books that tell you more about what he was like and how much they all loved him, because I feel like that’s important.

From Alive, Piers Paul Read:

Next to Parrado, Numa Turcatti was the most generally beloved of the boys. [...] Since he had known few of the boys before leaving Montevideo, it was proof of his strength, simplicity and complete lack of malice that he became so loved and respected by them.

On celebrating Numa's birthday while trapped under the avalanche:

The boys gave him an extra cigarette and made a birthday cake out of snow. [...] Many would have liked to give him a better time on his birthday, but instead it was he who improved their spirits. "We have survived the worst," he said. "From now on, things can only get better."

From Society of the Snow, Pablo Vierci:

‘When I talk about Numa, I can’t help but cry,’ says Coche Inciarte. ‘He’s the best person I’ve ever met in my life. However tenderly I cared for those who were losing heart, Numa did it much better because he never got tired. He was constantly aware of everyone else’s distress. He radiated peace, he never gave up, and when he came near me, I felt like Jesus Christ himself was among us, with such mercy and compassion in his eyes. I don’t know where he got his strength.’ ‘I could never imagine him living in everyday life, because I met him and I loved him in that torment of the Andes,’ says Coche. ‘He had a hard time eating, like I did. We ate the bare minimum in order to survive. I lost one hundred pounds, he lost more. And just like me, his leg became infected after the avalanche. We operated on our legs together with a razor blade. But he deteriorated more quickly than I did, because he had given so much more; he had been too generous.’

Moncho Sabella:

Numa taught us about the anonymous heroism of giving more of himself to others than he reserved for himself. In that balance between solidarity and selfishness, which decided whether you lived or died, he tilted the balance in favour of the others to the detriment of himself. [...] And when the avalanche came and covered the plane, the one who worked the hardest, the one who removed the most snow so that we could come back to life, was Numa. Again, he was exceeding his own limits. [...] In the end, his immune system was so devastated that he got one infection after another. We gave him antibiotics and the doctors on the mountain attended to him every day, but finally he left us. And with him, we all died a little more.

Gustavo Zerbino:

I always remember Numa up there, full of despair, when he told us that he would rather die watching the sky, walking, instead of ending life immobilised in a cave of broken metal. For that reason, after the avalanche, he kept digging and removing snow without rest until he burned himself out with exhaustion. He always thought that his time had come but he wanted to work until the final moment, doing whatever he could to help. I cared for him all those days; I saw how he was hurried to the brink of death, with no defences, getting one infection after another. I went up to him and first I gave him a kiss on the cheek to greet him and asked him how he was doing. He just stared at me with a kind of infinite peace. He never complained. But Numa was quickly deteriorating: from that physical strength and vigour he had had at the beginning, he finished as a skeletal dying boy. He held on to his characteristic qualities until the end though. He was that same stoic guy when he was strong and when he was wasting away.

‘Gustavo Zerbino didn’t tell us the whole truth [about the expedition] because he didn’t want us to be discouraged. When I asked Numa about it, he couldn’t lie and he told me: “As far as we went, all you could see were more mountains.” But even so, he always wanted to be an expeditionary. “I want to go,” he told me, even though I knew at once he could never go, he was too exhausted and too hurt.’ So Numa approached Daniel Fernández, knowing that he had influence over the others, and he tried to convince him: ‘I can do it, Daniel, please believe me. I can do it.’ Daniel recalls, ‘When I told him that his injury made it impossible, he started working even harder than ever, like a bull, shovelling snow to unbury the plane after the avalanche to show that yes, he could do it.’

Finally, from Alive, after Numa died:

On this particular afternoon, Javier Methol lay at the back of the plane. "Be careful," he said to Coche as he rose and stepped over Numa's body. "Be careful not to step on Numa." "But Numa's dead," said Parrado. Javier had not realised what had happened, and now that he understood his spirits dropped completely. He wept as he had wept at the death of Liliana, for he had grown to love the shy and simple Numa Turcatti as though he were his brother or son.

I'm not sure the Numa we see in the film is quite the same person that he actually was on that mountain, but I'm so, so glad that he got a voice. He fought so hard for them all.

So, yeah. In the immortal words of Jake Peralta,

#society of the snow

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Rare pictures of Numa Turcatti taken from the end credits of Society of the Snow

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The newspapers write about the heroes of the Andes. The ones who returned from death to reunite with their fathers. Their mothers. Their girlfriends. And their children. Only, they don't feel like heroes. They were dead like us. And only they got to return home. And now when they remember us, they ask themselves, "why didn't we all get to come back? What is the meaning of it all?". Only you can give it meaning. You're all the answer. Keep taking care of each other. And tell everyone what we did in the mountains.

LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE (2023)

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Nando Parrado's sister passed away today. - La Sociedad de la Nieve/Society of the Snow (2023)

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Until now, the Strauch cousins have been able to make the meat just meat. No name. No face. But that's no longer possible. - La Sociedad de la Nieve/Society of the Snow (2023)

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Sigan cuidándose unos a otros. Y cuéntenles a todos lo que hicimos en la montaña. Keep taking care of each other. And tell everyone what we did on the mountain.

LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE (2023), Dir J.A Bayona // Heather Christle, "Then We Are In Agreement" // Matthew 25:35-40 // Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides // Lucy Keating, Dreamology // Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays // Olga Tokarczuk, "The Tender Narrator", Translated by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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Los periódicos hablan de los héroes de Los Andes. Los que regresaron de la muerte para reencontrarse con sus padres, sus madres, sus novias, y sus hijos. Pero ellos no se sienten héroes. Porque estuvieron muertos como nosotros, y solo ellos regresaron. Y al recordarnos, se preguntan por qué no volvimos juntos. The newspapers write about the heroes of the Andes. The ones who came back from death to reunite with their fathers, their mothers, their girlfriends, and their children. But they don't feel like heroes. Because they were dead like us, and only they got to return. And when they remember us, they ask themselves,"Why didn't we all get to come back?" LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE / SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (2023)

#society of the snow

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LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE: ¿QUIÉNES FUIMOS EN LA MONTAÑA? SOCIETY OF THE SNOW: WHO WERE WE ON THE MOUNTAIN? 2024 | dir. Manuel Romo

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movies watched in 2024:society of the snow / la sociedad de la nieve (2023) directed by j.a. bayona

rating: ★★★★★