Real survivor behind ‘horrifying’ Netflix film says eating his friends wasn’t the worst part

'People that look at this story from outside think that eating our dead friends was the worst part'

In 1972, a Uruguayan flight to Santiago, Chile, crashed in the Andes, with 45 people on board.

There were 29 initial survivors of the crash, although 13 were later killed in an avalanche. As the days and nights in the remote mountains continued, the group resorted to eating the dead passengers in order to survive.

In the end, 16 people survived 72 nights in the freezing mountains. One of these was Roberto Canessa, who recently revealed the cannibalism wasn't the worst part of the hellish ordeal for him.

Speaking to Good Morning Britain, he said: "The people that look at this story from outside think that eating our dead friends was the worst part.

"But the worst part was the avalanche. I was buried alive for five or six minutes thinking I was dying. We were buried there for four days."

Canessa continued: "So there’s a succession of events that happened that made the stories so intriguing, and led people to ask, 'how did you do that?'

"Well, 19-year-old rugby players, university students, all these components were very important for us to build a different society.

"There were no amicable forces, from being a rugby player to a mountain man, we didn’t even have snow in Uruguay."

The incredible tale of survival was recently made into a Netflix film, called Society of the Snow. The film is based based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name, which documents the accounts of the 16 survivors.

Director J.A. Bayona said: "We did extensive interviews with the survivors, so all these details were taken from that. The black urine is something that starts when the body starts to consume the organs, not the fat.

"So it’s actually quite ironic because they [initially] decided not to use the bodies and in that moment, they were consuming their own bodies."

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