Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time at the end to discuss what it means that fifty years after the Andes disaster, the survivors still needed a new film to tell their story — and what they felt the previous versions had not yet said about them.

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PABLO VIERCI AND THE BOOK: THE SURVIVORS’ OWN ACCOUNT, FIFTY YEARS ON
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  1. Society of the Snow: A Book Written With the Survivors
    Pablo Vierci’s 2008 book — published in Spanish as La Sociedad de la Nieve — is unusual among the many accounts of the 1972 Andes disaster because it was written by a childhood friend of several survivors, someone with deep personal access to the men and an understanding of what happened to them. Vierci worked closely with the survivors over years, and the book reflects their own evolving understanding of their experience: what they did, why they did it, and what it means. Did the book feel like journalism, oral history, or something closer to communal memoir? And does Vierci’s personal relationship with the survivors change how you read the account’s claim to authority?
  2. The Book’s Title and Its Argument: The Society as the Story
    The title La Sociedad de la Nieve — The Society of the Snow — deliberately reframes the standard way the disaster has been told. Rather than centering the individual drama of survival or the sensational element of cannibalism, it insists that what the survivors built on that mountain was a society: a set of mutual obligations, collective decisions, and shared ethical commitments that were as much the story as the physical endurance. Did either version make this societal argument feel as central as the title implies, or did the survival drama and its most extreme elements inevitably pull attention away from the collective dimension?
  3. Vierci vs. Read: Two Books About the Same Event
    Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors was the first major account of the disaster and has defined how most of the world understands it. Vierci’s book is explicitly a different account — written from within the Uruguayan community, in Spanish, with a different emphasis and a different set of relationships with the survivors. Did reading or knowing Vierci’s book change how you understand the event relative to Read’s account? And are there specific dimensions of the survivors’ experience that Vierci captures that Read’s more journalistic account couldn’t access?
  4. The Dead as Narrators: Vierci’s Formal Choice
    One of the book’s most distinctive choices is giving voice to the dead—the passengers who did not survive are allowed to speak, describe their experience, and be present in the narrative as full people rather than simply as losses. This is also one of Bayona’s most striking formal choices in the film. Did this device feel like the right approach for a story in which the dead are present in a very particular way throughout — their bodies the condition of the living survivors’ survival — or like a formal risk that each version handled with varying degrees of success?

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BAYONA’S FILM: THE SPANISH DIRECTOR AND THE SPANISH-SPEAKING STORY
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  1. A. Bayona’s Direction: The Cultural Return of a Story to Its Own Language
    Bayona’s film is the first major English-language film about the Andes disaster, or rather — crucially — it is not. It is made in Spanish, with Latin American actors playing Uruguayan survivors, financed in part by Netflix for global release. This is a significant correction to the 1993 Hollywood Alive, in which English-speaking American and British actors played Uruguayan rugby players. Did the language choice feel like the most important formal decision Bayona made? And does hearing these characters speak Spanish — arguing, praying, grieving in their own language — change the experience of the story in ways you can identify?
  2. The Ensemble Approach: Choosing Not to Center Individual Heroes
    The 1993 Alive centers primarily on Nando Parrado and his individual heroism. Bayona’s film deliberately distributes attention across the ensemble — multiple survivors, multiple perspectives, multiple moments of decision and endurance — in ways that honor the book’s argument that this was a collective experience. Did the ensemble approach feel like the right formal choice for a story about a society rather than a heroic individual? Were there moments when the distribution of attention made it harder to follow specific characters’ emotional arcs?
  3. The Visual Rendering of the Andes: Beauty and Horror Simultaneously
    Bayona’s film renders the Andes landscape with extraordinary visual precision — the specific quality of the snow, the scale of the mountains, the way the wreckage sits in the white. The beauty of the landscape and the horror of the situation are present simultaneously, which is one of the film’s most distinctive formal qualities. Did this visual approach feel like the right aesthetic for this material, or did the beauty of the images occasionally feel at odds with the experience being depicted? Which version—Vierci’s prose or the film’s images—made the physical reality of the Andes feel most fully present?
  4. The Cannibalism: How Each Version Handles the Story’s Most Difficult Element
    The survivors’ decision to eat the flesh of those who had died is the element of the story that has most defined its public reception since 1972. Vierci’s book approaches this with considerable care, rendering the decision as a collective ethical deliberation rather than an act of desperation or transgression. Bayona’s film handles it with similar restraint and moral seriousness. Did each version give the decision the ethical weight it deserves — making it feel like a genuine moral reckoning rather than a sensational element? And which version made the survivors’ own framing of the decision — as a gift from their dead friends, as an act of communion rather than violation — feel most fully honored?

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THE 1993 ALIVE: THE PREVIOUS TELLING AND WHAT IT GOT WRONG
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  1. Alive (1993): The Hollywood Version and Its Limitations
    Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive, based on Piers Paul Read’s book, was for most of the world’s audience the defining screen version of the Andes disaster. It stars Ethan Hawke and was made in English with largely Anglo-American actors. The surviving Uruguayans have been publicly ambivalent about it — grateful that it told their story to the world, uncomfortable with what it got wrong. Did anyone in your group see Alive before Society of the Snow? What specific elements of Society of the Snow felt most clearly like a correction or a completion of what Alive didn’t manage to say?
  2. Language, Culture, and the Casting Problem
    The casting of English-speaking actors as Uruguayan rugby players in the 1993 film is the most visible dimension of a broader cultural displacement — a Hollywood studio making a film about a South American community in a Hollywood register. Bayona’s film, with Spanish-speaking Latin American actors, explicitly corrects this. Did the language and cultural authenticity of Bayona’s film change not just the sound of the story but its fundamental texture — the specific way these characters relate to each other, to their faith, to their community? And is there a dimension of the story that was simply not accessible in English?
  3. Nando Parrado’s Centrality in Alive vs. the Ensemble in Society of the Snow
    The 1993 Alive centers Nando Parrado (Ethan Hawke) as the film’s primary protagonist and frames the story largely through his individual journey. Society of the Snow deliberately decentralizes this — Parrado is present but not the film’s organizing consciousness. The survivors themselves have suggested this collective approach better represents their actual experience. Did the ensemble approach of Bayona’s film feel more honest to the nature of the experience than Alive’s individual-hero structure? And does centering an individual make for a better or a worse film, independent of the accuracy question?

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THE ETHICAL DIMENSIONS: WHAT EACH VERSION DOES WITH THE HARDEST QUESTIONS
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  1. The Decision to Eat: Three Versions, Three Framings
    Vierci’s book, Bayona’s film, and the 1993 film Alive each frame the survivors’ decision to eat the flesh of the dead differently. Read’s book (and the 1993 film) frames it partly in terms of Catholic moral theology — the survivors reasoning their way to an ethical justification. Vierci and Bayona frame it more as an act of love and communion, a gift between people who had already formed deep bonds. Did the framing matter to you — did the different ways of understanding the same decision feel like genuinely different arguments about what the decision was? And which framing felt most honest to what the survivors themselves have said?
  2. The Dead and Their Bodies: The Story’s Central Ethical Paradox
    The bodies that sustained the living survivors belonged to people those survivors had known, loved, and traveled with. The ethical paradox is not resolvable in conventional moral terms—it is both an act of survival and an act the survivors themselves have described with profound complexity. Did each version honor this complexity, or did each version reach for a resolution that simplified what is genuinely irreducible? And which version sat most honestly with the impossibility of making this fully okay?
  3. Faith and the Andes: The Catholic Dimension of the Story
    The survivors were Uruguayan Catholics, and their faith — its role in their decisions, their endurance, and their eventual understanding of what happened — is central to the story Vierci tells. Bayona’s film gives faith significant weight. Did either version give the survivors’ specific Catholic faith its appropriate complexity — making it feel like a genuine spiritual resource rather than a narrative convenience? And which version made the relationship between faith and survival feel most like something the survivors themselves would recognize?
  4. The Survivors Speaking for Themselves: What It Means That They Endorsed This Version
    The surviving members of the 1972 crash gave Bayona’s film their explicit endorsement—they worked with the production, appeared in documentary materials around the film’s release, and have spoken about it as the version that most accurately represents their experience. Did the knowledge of this endorsement change how you watched the film? And is survivor approval a meaningful criterion for evaluating an adaptation’s accuracy or quality of an adaptation —or does it simply mean survivors preferred how they were depicted, which is not quite the same thing?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHOSE SNOW WAS MOST REAL?
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  1. What Vierci’s Book Gives You That the Film Can’t
    Vierci’s book gives you access to the survivors’ own words and evolving understanding across decades—how they have processed the experience over fifty years, the specific texture of their relationships, and their moral deliberations. Were there passages in the book where this depth of access gave you something the film’s two hours couldn’t accommodate? Name one element of Vierci’s account that the film compressed in ways you felt.
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Better Than the Book Described
    Name one moment where Bayona’s direction gave you something Vierci’s prose couldn’t: the scale of the Andes, a specific performance, the avalanche sequence, the walk out. Which cinematic moment felt like the ideal version of what this story needed — something that only the camera could give you?
  3. The Netflix Effect: What Global Distribution Does to a Local Story
    Society of the Snow was released on Netflix globally, which gave it an enormous international audience — far larger than the 1993 Alive achieved. This distribution makes the film the defining version of the Andes story for a new global generation. Did the Netflix context feel present in the film itself — did anything about its production feel calibrated for global rather than local audiences? And is there a tension between the film’s explicit cultural authenticity (Spanish language, Latin American cast, survivor endorsement) and its simultaneous positioning as a global entertainment product?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW MUCH OF THE SOCIETY SURVIVED THE TELLING?
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  1. The Right Version at the Right Time: Why 2023 and Not 1993
    Society of the Snow is the third major screen version of the Andes disaster and arguably the best—but it was also made fifty years after the event, when the cultural conditions for telling the story from within the Uruguayan community were finally in place. Did the film feel like it could only have been made now—that the combination of streaming distribution, Latin American cinema’s global prestige, and the survivors’ continued engagement with their story required this specific historical moment? And what does it say that it took fifty years for the definitive version to exist?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for Vierci’s book, one for Bayona’s film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Collective Account of a Survival Experience Written From Within the Community; Best Visual Rendering of an Extreme Landscape as Both Beautiful and Fatal; Best Ensemble Film About a Society Rather Than a Hero; Best Handling of an Extreme Ethical Situation With Dignity and Without Sensationalism; Best Use of the Dead as Narrative Voices Rather Than Simply as Losses.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both — and Which Watch?
    If a friend had time for only one version — Vierci’s book, Bayona’s film, or the 1993 Alive — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want the survivors’ own account in its most complete form? If they want the visual experience of the Andes? If they want the story told in the language it belongs to? And is there a case that watching Society of the Snow first and then reading Vierci’s book gives you the richer experience — that the film provides the faces and the landscape and the ensemble that make Vierci’s more meditative account feel most fully present?
  4. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “a beautifully made film that honored its source and its subjects while making inevitable cinematic compressions,” where does Society of the Snow land? And the question both versions keep asking in their different ways: what do we owe the dead — especially when what we owe them is the act of survival itself? Did either version give you an answer you could hold, or just the image of the Andes in winter, and the specific silence that lives inside it?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your snow.