Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, “The Circle of Snows” retraces the ordeal of the survivors of the Andes Mountains, a tragedy that occurred in 1972. We asked a few questions to an emergency doctor to enlighten us on some details.
Fifty-one years after the tragedy in the Andes, director Juan Antonio Bayona tells this story again in The Circle of Snows. For the sake of realism, the film was designed with the help of the sixteen survivors. During hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, they shared their memories to allow the film to be as faithful as possible.
Faced with certain events in the film, many questions come to assail us, some of them are of a medical nature. To find answers, AlloCiné contacted an expert, Waël Houhou, emergency doctor and co-founder of Hiking Survival Carea company that provides medical training for hikers and survivalists.
How long can you live without eating?
Dr. Waël Houhou: We can go three weeks without eating and three days without drinking. Beyond ten days, depending on our body reserves, the body will self-digest. That is to say, we will digest what is least important in order to survive what is most essential to us. We’re going to attack sugar, fat, then everything muscle. This is called muscle wasting. People suffering from malnutrition have no more fat, no more muscles because the body will digest the muscles to supply the main organs, namely the heart and the brain.
If this is prolonged, there are cases of extreme autophagy. The body will therefore digest its own non-essential organs in the short term. For example, the liver or pancreas can be devoured to continue feeding the brain, which is the body’s main organ.
Do we lose weight faster in the cold?
Dr. Waël Houhou: Yes. There is something called body homeostasis. Our proteins have optimal temperatures to function properly. The human body is between 36 and 38 degrees. So whatever the environment, our body must remain at the same temperature.
In hypothermia, the body must remain at room temperature. This is where the thrills come. Shivering is involuntary, repeated muscle contractions that require a lot of calories. Shivering will deplete our energy reserves so we will degrade our cells, our proteins to maintain the shivers. As this requires energy, we will immediately hit the fat stock.
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At what temperature can you freeze to death?
Dr. Waël Houhou: When the body is under 28 degrees. Between 32 and 28 degrees, we no longer have the necessary energy and connections with the muscles so we stop shivering. Below 28 degrees, it’s cardiac arrest. From 32 degrees, the body stops. We breathe slower, everything diminishes. The heart rate drops below 60 beats per minute, we will breathe once every 6.7 seconds. It has a name: bradycardia. Then we fall into a coma and have a cardiac arrest.
The outside temperature ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is not the temperature but the concentration of the medium. In water for example, there are a lot of particles so we will be in more contact with the cold. We often use the example of the Titanic. Being in water at 5 degrees for five minutes can be much more dramatic than spending five hours outside at zero degrees.
Why does urine turn brown in the movie?
Dr. Waël Houhou: Urine becomes more and more concentrated when there is a case of dehydration. Urine is the kidney that filters the blood. Blood continually passes through the kidney. When you are dehydrated, the kidney tells itself that it must keep as much water as possible so it will put out very little urine, but your body still produces waste, notably urea and bilirubin, which are blood breakdown products.
Red blood cells have a lifespan of 100 days and when they die, they are waste that the body must expel. This is why urine is yellow. So when you don’t drink, you still have to manage to extract this waste and that’s why the urine becomes more concentrated and can have a darker color.
Comments collected by Thomas Desroches on January 10, 2024.
The Snow Circle is available on Netflix.