Alive

Alive (1993) is a survival drama directed by Frank Marshall — watch it online on iFILM. In October 1972, a charter flight carrying a Uruguayan rugby squad breaks apart over the Andes and scatters wreckage across a high-altitude plateau. The players who survive the impact find themselves stranded at roughly four thousand metres, cut off from any road, with no radio contact and temperatures that drop well below freezing each night.

Search-and-rescue teams call off the operation after eleven days. The survivors are left to work out what comes next on their own. Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, and Vincent Spano lead the cast through the seventy-two days the group spent on the mountain before two of them finally crossed the range on foot to find help.

Frank Marshall adapted Piers Paul Read's 1974 non-fiction account of the crash, which has remained in print ever since. The film resists easy heroics — it stays close to the physical reality of cold and hunger, letting the decisions speak for themselves. Stream Alive (1993) online on iFILM.