J. A. Bayona is preparing for a disaster…

The 46-year-old Spanish Goya Award-winning film director will direct the Spanish-language disaster film Society of the Snow for Netflix.

Based on the book La sociedad de la nieve by Pablo Vierci, the film is set in 1972, charting the true story of what happens after an Uruguayan Air Force flight transporting a rugby team to Chile cashes on a glacier in the Andes. Only 29 of the 45 passengers survived the crash, finding themselves in one of the world’s toughest environments, forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.

Bayona, whose credits include The Impossible, The Orphanage and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, has written the screenplay with Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego.

Producers are Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida.

The film will shoot in Sierra Nevada (Andalucía, Spain), in Montevideo (Uruguay) and in various locations in the Andes (both in Chile and Argentina) including El Valle de las Lágrimas, the location where the real incident took place.

The cast will include Enzo Vogrincic Roldán, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Tomas Wolf, Diego Ariel Vegezzi, Esteban Kukuriczka, Francisco Romero, Rafael Federman, Felipe González Otaño, Agustín Della Corte, Valentino Alonso, Simón Hempe, Fernando Contigiani García, Benjamín Segura, Jerónimo Bosia.

“It was during the documentation process for The Impossible that I discovered Society of the Snow, Pablo Vierci’s fascinating chronicle about the tragedy of the Andes,” said From J. A. Bayona. “More than ten years later, my fascination for the novel remains intact and I am happy to face the challenge that lies ahead: To tell one of the most remembered events of the 20th century, with all the complexity that implies a story that gives so much relevance to the survivors as well as to those who never returned from the mountains. I also face it in Spanish, a language that I excitedly return to after 14 years without filming in my own language, and with a team of young Uruguayan and Argentine actors, whom I’m totally thrilled with.”