Oscars: Spain Picks J.A. Bayona’s ‘Society of the Snow’ for International Feature Category

J.A. Bayona’s real-life disaster thriller Society of the Snow has been selected by Spain as it submission for the best international feature category at the 2024 Oscars.

The decision comes less than two weeks after the Netflix film had its world premiere as the closing feature of the Venice Film Festival.

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Society of the Snow — about the Uruguayan 1972 Andes flight disaster and based on Pablo Vierci’s book — becomes Bayona’s second time representing him home country for international feature award after his 2007 breakout The Orphanage, which was also his last film in Spanish.

It also becomes the first Netflix film selected by Spain.

Spain has a solid track record in the Oscars international feature race, with four wins — most recently in 2004 for The Sea Inside — from 20 nominations. Its last appearance in the category was in 2019, when Pedro Almodovar — who won in 1999 for All About My Mother — was nominated for Pain and Glory.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about Society of the Snow, Bayona said he’d actually first been inspired to make the film while working on The Impossible, with his 2012 hit actually named after a passage in Vieri’s book.

The 1972 flight disaster, which saw a plane of 45 mostly young rugby players from Uruguay crash in the Andes with only 16 people surviving after 72 days in the snowy environment and after having been forced to take extreme measures — including cannibalism — to stay alive, has been put to screen before (most notably Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive). But Bayona says his film was the first to tell the story of the entire “society” on board the plane and was the first that involved the survivors and families of those who died, to the extent that they allowed the film to use their real names.

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