Bringing to life a struggle for survival

Can you call a movie "feel-good" if it includes an aviation disaster, a deadly avalanche, and human cannibalism? That's the paradox of the grueling yet ultimately exhilarating "Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains."

Gonzalo Arijon's documentary leads us with grim specifics through the infamous 1972 ordeal of 16 Uruguayan rugby players marooned high in the Andes for 72 days. You come out blinking in the sunlight, moved to tears not only by the miracle of human endurance but by the eerie metaphysical bonds that privation can forge. Only the survivors can understand what they went through, but the movie's triumph is in bringing us close enough to breathe that thin air.

The events have already been the subject of the 1974 bestseller "Alive" and a 1993 Hollywood film of the same name. Arijon is intent on memorializing rather than dramatizing, though, and he has at his disposal all 16 of the men, now in their 50s, who he interviews both one-on-one and during a trip back to the site of the crash during the summer months. (Wreckage from the plane still litters the valley.)

Of the young men and their families who were on the plane when it ditched in a mountain snowfield during a storm, 12 didn't survive the crash, six subsequently died of their injuries, and eight more were killed in the avalanche that swept down upon them on day 16. Those who remained achieved a weird existential purity of suffering, unmoored from the living world after hearing radio reports that the search for them had been called off.

"We became disconnected; we didn't matter," says one of the boys, now a grown man wearing a North Face jacket amid the harsh splendor of the Andean Cordillera. Another recalls, "We no longer existed for the outside world. We felt we had to knock at the door of civilization and ask it to take us in again." Arijon uses dramatic reenactments to visualize their trial and to break up all the talking heads, but he doles them out wordlessly, as impressionistic backdrop to memory.

The cannibalism is dealt with as the men dealt with it, a horrid but incontrovertible fact and one best not to dwell on. Five or six days after the crash, the survivors debated and quickly decided. Some rationalized it as a kind of Holy Communion, while others were more direct. "I made my choice," says one. "I decided to live."

The final act of "Stranded" is its most suspenseful, as Roberto Canessa and Fernando Parrado recall their 44-mile trek across the mountains to seek rescue. Says the Chilean herdsman who found them, "They smelled of the grave. No animal would go near them." Black-and-white footage shows the impossibly gaunt young men boarding the rescue helicopters; 34 years later, Arijon films "Fito" Strauch returning to the scene with his grown daughter. "I'm really glad to be here," he tells her, and you're not sure in what sense he means that. Then you realize he means, and has earned, all of them.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ movienation.