Stranded! The Andes Plane Crash Survivors

Description: In this excellent documentary survivors of the famous 1972 rugby team plane that crashed in the Andes tell their story with reenactments. This time, unlike the case of Errol Morris’ new film about the Abu Ghraib scandal, ’Standard Operating Procedure,’ reenactments cause no discomfort, even though aspects of the events shown are famously chilling. That’s because in this context, as with Kevin Macdonald’s ’Touching the Void’ (coincidentally also about survivors in the Andes), participants in the events are present on-screen to describing everything in detail so staged scenes don’t feel like intrusion or speculation. There was a film dramatizing the events, Frank Marshall’s 1993 ’Alive,’ with Ethan Hawke, Vincent Spano, and others, but this will be the definitive film statement on this event, one of the great survival stories of recent times. The grainy recreations blend seamlessly with the actual film footage shot of the survivors at the moment when they were rescued.