Tenía que sobrevivir

Behind this true story of a highly unorthodox doctor lies his riveting past encounter with death.

A nineteen year-old pre-med student and rugby player boards aplane with some 40 other passengers,fellow teammates with various members of their families,bound for a sports competition in Chile in October 1972.  In the middle of the flight, in one of the most uninhabitable stretches of the Andes, the plane crashes.  After a prolonged search, the passengers and crew are given up for dead. After all, it is late October and, with subzero temperatures and the worst of the winter winds and snows already underway, survival in those mountains would be nothing short of a miracle.

Seventy-two days later, two young men, aged 19 and 22, walk out of those mountains alive.  One of them is that pre-med student named Roberto Canessa.  When the youths arrive at a village, no one believes where they say they have descended from. Finally they convince the authorities to returnwith them, and when the search party arrives on horseback, they discover the impossible: 14other survivors, for whom Roberto had become, by necessity, a doctor on the mountain.