Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains (Arijon, 2007): France

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, the second film from director Gonzalo Arijon, requires a different form of review. The story is a well known one – a small plane containing forty five people from and related to the Old Christians rugby team crashed into a mountain in the Andes and sixteen kept themselves alive for more than two months by consuming the remains of those who had already died – so I cannot whet you appetite for the film by setting up the premises and making you want to see more. And whet it I must, for this film, shown at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in the wake of great word of mouth from Sundance, is a must see.

Using a combination of reconstruction footage, grainy photographs taken by the survivors as they clung onto life where none should be and new interviews with the men who lived to tell the tale, Arijon has woven a captivating piece of cinema. The washed-out reconstruction footage takes the audience through the journey that the plane and its passengers took, from hi-jinks on the runway, gallows humor on the plane as things began to go awry and on through the crash and eventual rescue. This runs in parallel with the interviews with the survivors which begin as talking heads but end up showing several of the survivors making an emotional trip, along with members of their families, back to the crash site thirty years after the event.

These men have seen things and experienced things which are beyond the comprehension of most. The endured that which would have killed many – either though exposure, starvation or through simply losing the will to live – and they survived. The moments of silence in their tales are the most telling, the moments when they can find no words to explain the horrors and where the audience must rely on the echoes in their eyes. The men rarely refer to themselves – they praise or express sympathy for others, never seeking glory or pity for their own actions or losses.

When it comes to the most controversial element of the tale, the cannibalism of the already dead, the director neither skirts nor sensationalises the event. The simple sound of tearing fibres is enough to curl the toes in the reconstruction and no more is needed there. The men recount it with solemnity and dignity, far more than the press did when the secret to their survival was discovered. Their ability to separate the friends they had lost from the means of their survival was born out of desperation, but by the end of the film anyone who did not understand it, sympathise with it and finally approve of it had far harsher sensibilities than I.

There is little more that I can say to encourage you to see this film. My eloquence fails in the light of the words of the men who lived to tell the tale. The Sundance word of mouth was right – if you can endure the subject matter this is a film that should not be missed.