Note: I’ve seen four notable documentaries over the past two days, all of which are competing here for jury prizes: The Order of Myths, The Recruiter, Bigger Stronger Faster, and Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. In the interest of time and brevity, I’m going to file short posts on each today, but I may revisit a least one or two of these after more thought and possibly additional viewings Stranded and Bigger today. I think I blew my wad on The Recruiter on this episode of Filmspotting, and I’d definitely like to see The Order of Myths again and then write about it more in depth. 

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

Dubbed by festival shorthand “the cannibal plane crash doc,” it’s a 113-minute oral history of the infamous crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was previously dramatized in the 1993 Ethan Hawke film, Alive. The surviving survivors give incredibly articulate, revealing, and comprehensive testimony on their ten weeks on that mountain, some (all?) from the site of the crash, but let’s not kid ourselves: this is a film about hearing (and, more affectingly, watching) people explain what it felt like to save their own lives by eating their friends. Filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon understands this maybe too well, and the film’s length––excessive by all accounts––could be reduced somewhat if he were to let go of some of the survivors’ verbal attempts at justification.

And yet, there are breathtaking moments padded around the somewhat redundant justifications, often when the camera holds on a subject’s face after a recollection. They stare straight ahead, frozen, dazed, as if shocked at their own memories. There’s nothing about this story or the way it’s told that would make any viewer feel anything but sympathy for their ordeal, and certainly, this is a case where asking us to take a second to contemplate the image of someone saying “I didn’t want to do it, but I had to” has far greater impact than the words themselves. Those shots, of an eye twitching almost imperceptibly while a survivor recovers from an admission, tell us everything we need to know.