Cinema Science

This just became one of my most anticipated films of 2008. I love survival stories, with men against the elements and this sounds exactly like that. This story has already been told on film once, in the fictional film Alive. From Hollywood Elsewhere.

I've just heard from a non-vested party that a Sundance World Documentary selection called Stranded is a major wow. It's partly a first-hand, looking-back documentary and partly a re-enactment of the 1972 Andes plane crash disaster in which 16 people (including members of a rugby team from Uruguay) managed to survive over a 72-day ordeal, partly by eating the flesh of those who'd been killed.

"It's a lot like Kevin McDonald's Touching The Void," the guy told me, "and I mean easily as good as that...the survivors go back to the site and describe what happened with parts of it reanacted...it's really something else." The French-produced doc was directed and written by Gonzalo Arijon. It will show four times at Sundance (the first screening being early Friday evening, 1.18), and is also booked to show at Roger Durling's Santa Barbara Film Festival at the end of the month.

The full title is actually Stranded: I've come from a plane that crashed on the mountains.