He has spoken publicly about the experience throughout his career, including in contexts where the ethical questions around the survival story are explicitly raised. His position, articulated in his memoir and in numerous interviews, is that what the survivors did was moral under the circumstances — not simply defensible or excusable but morally appropriate given the full context of what they faced. The dead had already died. Using what they left behind to preserve the living was an act of respect as much as an act of desperation.
Canessa has also spoken about the psychological cost of the survival period — not in terms of ongoing trauma, though that dimension exists, but in terms of the specific weight of having watched people die when better circumstances might have allowed him to save them. The gap between what a medical student knows and what a physician with equipment can do is a gap that he lived inside for 72 days. He came out of it knowing medicine the way people know things only when they have felt their limits from the inside.
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## Society of the Snow: The 2023 Film and the Historical Record
The 2023 Spanish-language film *Society of the Snow*, directed by J. A. Bayona and produced by Netflix, is the most recent major cinematic treatment of the 1972 Andes crash. It won 12 Goya Awards — the Spanish equivalent of the Academy Awards — and was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best International Feature Film.
The film is based on Pablo Vierci’s book *Society of the Snow*, published in 2008, which drew on interviews with all sixteen surviving survivors. Its approach to the story differs in significant ways from the 1993 Hollywood film *Alive*, which was based on Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book and took a more conventional survival-thriller approach to the material.