The rescue was only the beginning.
Netflix has released the first teaser for Beyond Society, a new three-part documentary series that returns to the true story behind Society of the Snow — but this time, the focus is on everything that happened after the survivors finally came home.
Created by J.A. Bayona and Carlos Torres, the series brings together survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and the families of those who never returned from the Andes.
Rather than retelling the 1972 disaster itself, Beyond Society explores the decades that followed.
How do you return to ordinary life after surviving something almost impossible to comprehend? How does a family live with losing someone in circumstances that become known around the world? And what happens when your most traumatic experience is repeatedly transformed into books, documentaries and movies?
Those questions sit at the heart of the new series.
Beyond Society also brings together several of the writers and filmmakers who have helped shape the public understanding of the tragedy, including Piers Paul Read, author of Alive, and Pablo Vierci, whose book Society of the Snow inspired Bayona’s acclaimed 2023 film.
Frank Marshall, director of the 1993 film Alive, also appears alongside Bayona himself.
But perhaps the most fascinating element of the project comes when Bayona and much of the cast of Society of the Snow travel back to the Andes and visit the actual Valley of Tears.
For the actors who portrayed the passengers, it creates an unusual meeting between the real people, the fictional versions of their experiences and the physical place where everything happened.
The documentary then moves beyond the mountain, tracing how the crash affected an entire community over the following five decades — and how the story became a global phenomenon that continues to be retold.
Society of the Snow concentrated largely on survival.
Beyond Society asks a much harder question:
What happens when you survive?
Directed by Carlos Torres and produced by J.A. Bayona, Sandra Hermida and Belén Atienza, Beyond Society will premiere globally on Netflix on December 18, 2026.
