On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes, immediately killing one-third of its 45 passengers and leaving the larger fraction on a snowy mountain to die. Seventy-two grueling days and 13 more deaths later, those remaining were finally, miraculously rescued. Piers Paul Read famously chronicled the ordeal in his 1974 novel "Alive," but once the media latched onto the nourishment-through-cannibalism angle, it overshadowed all other aspects of this jawdropping feat of endurance. Documentarian Gonzalo Arijon's "Stranded: I've Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountains" essentially reclaims the story for the survivors, allowing them to finally tell their stories more than three decades later.

Arijon occasionally incorporates re-enactments, alternately muted and saturated, to depict the growing hopelessness. But his intense film becomes poignantly poetic when hearing firsthand from the men who made it back. They allude only slightly to the cannibalism at first, then try to explain to the world an unthinkable thought process that forced them to eat those they were still mourning. A mostly Catholic bunch, they treated this last resort as a kind of Holy Communion, giving their blessings in case the same were to happen to them. Body of Christ, indeed...