Gonzalo Arijón

Gonzalo Arijón was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1956 but has lived in France since 1979. Over the past 15 years, he has directed numerous documentaries, including Lula’s Brazil: Managing a Dream; Far Very Far from Rome, The Dark Side of Milosevic; Rio de Janeiro--A Vertical War; and For These Eyes, which won numerous awards at international film festivals. Arijon is a childhood friend of many of the young men featured in STRANDED.

“Several of these survivors are friends of mine. We shared the same carefree teenage years. I was shocked by their disappearance and dumbfounded when they came back to life. I shared whole nights with them, listening to their stories which constantly revolved around their survival up there. Their tragic – but also amazing! – epic continued to haunt them, day after day, year after year. And it’s still the case today. Despite a best-seller (“Alive! The story of the Andes survivors” by Piers Paul Read, five million copies sold in English alone), and despite a Hollywood movie (“Alive!” by Franck Marshall, a Disney-Paramount co-production), we still have the feeling that this story has never been told from the inside, that what they have to say has never really been heard. And there is always this growing feeling among them that they have something to tell us, to transmit to us, that is way beyond an “enormous anecdote”... Thirty years after the event, I suggested making a film about it. A film that tells of the creation of a new society, cut off from the rest of the world, requiring the reinvention of codes and rules. No leaders – in the traditional sense of the term – but rather a collection of personalities that are gradually revealed, which harmoniously head towards a common objective: to get out of this hell together, and return to the land of the living together. An exemplary story about exceeding oneself, getting to know one another, that deals with the importance of friendship and solidarity in extreme situations.”

-Gonzalo Arijón