It’s no secret that unbelievable survival stories have long inspired cinema. But few are as jaw-dropping as that of Larisa Savitskaya, a 20-year-old woman who, in 1981, was the sole survivor of a mid-air collision at over 16,000 feet. Now, her journey is the subject of the film The One. Discover the true story behind the movie!
The feature film dramatizes the eight-minute fall, three days of agony in the Siberian wilderness, and the resilience of a woman who refused to die. But as with any fact-based work, the question remains: what really happened, and what is poetic license? Based on our exclusive interview with Larisa Savitskaya herself and historical documents, Filmelier separates fact from fiction in this astounding account.
What happened in the 1981 air disaster?
The central fact is brutally true. On August 24, 1981, Larisa and her husband, Vladimir, were returning from their honeymoon aboard Aeroflot Flight 811, an Antonov An-24. Over the Amur region in the former Soviet Union (USSR), the aircraft collided mid-air with a Tupolev Tu-16K military bomber.
The collision, which occurred at 17,000 feet, disintegrated both planes. All 37 crew and passengers on both aircraft died, except for one person: Larisa Savitskaya. Clinging to a piece of the fuselage, she plummeted for eight long minutes before impacting the trees of a dense forest.
The Soviet cover-up: decades of silence or propaganda?
One of the most discussed points about the case is that the USSR allegedly hid the tragedy for years. The truth, however, is a bit more complex. In the Soviet Union, the rule was clear: planes did not crash. The regime’s image of infallibility was more important than transparency.
In conversation with Filmelier, Larisa Savitskaya clarified that the total silence didn’t last as long as one might think: “It wasn’t 10 years. The first newspaper article came out in 1984. So, it was 3 years,” she said. Even so, the pressure existed. The initial reports were vague, and the full investigation was only declassified in the 1990s. In the end, what happened was a policy of secrecy to cover up a grave error by the military flight controllers.
The film’s creative liberties, according to the survivor herself
Larisa Savitskaya was involved in the scriptwriting process. Still, she emphasized—in an exclusive interview with Filmelier—that the result is a work of art, not a documentary.
An art film, not a documentary
In our conversation, Larisa explained that “they tried very hard to make a believable film,” but that the main adaptation was the inclusion of dialogue during her time in the forest. “It’s a fiction film, they needed to create an image, because I was alone in the forest for three days. So, if they had filmed it exactly as it happened, I walked around, looked for people, but I was silent,” she revealed. The film needed to fill that solitude with narrative elements to keep the viewer engaged. “They needed to film it in a way that included dialogue and other things.”
But the tiger was real
When asked about the film’s believability, Larisa confirmed one detail that seems like fiction but, according to her, actually happened. At the end of her analysis, she made sure to add: “But the tiger was there.”
Other shocking facts from Larisa Savitskaya’s true story
The 75-ruble compensation
After surviving the fall, spending three days injured in the forest, and losing her husband, the official compensation Larisa received from the state airline Aeroflot was 75 rubles. At the time, the amount was equivalent to about 110 dollars—enough, according to her, to “last a month.” The paltry sum earned her a second mention in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of World Records; the first, of course, was for surviving the highest-altitude fall in history.
The movie that saved her life
This is the most cinematic detail of the true story. During the fall, Larisa remembered a film she had seen a year earlier, the Italian-Peruvian Miracles Still Happen (also known as Ten Days of Agony), from 1974. The film tells the true story of another air crash survivor. The image of the protagonist holding onto her seat to cushion the impact came to her mind.
In an interview with Filmelier, she explained: “When I was falling in the wreckage of the plane, I remembered [Miracles Still Happen]. A scene from the movie simply appeared before my eyes. And the girl in the film was flying in a seat, holding on. Since I was lying in the aisle, I lifted my head, saw an empty seat, climbed into it, and waited to hit the ground. So, in a way, that movie prompted me to take an action that saved my life,” Larisa recounted.
“That movie saved me,” the survivor emphasized. “And I hope that maybe my movie will help someone. Not necessarily in a plane disaster, but simply to not give up, to survive, and to have hope until the very end.”
Who is in the cast of The One?
The Russian film The One — originally titled Odna — stars actress Nadezhda Kaleganova in the role of Larisa Savitskaya. The cast also includes Maksim Ivanov as her husband, Vladimir, as well as Viktor Dobronravov and Yan Tsapnik in supporting roles.
How is Larisa Savitskaya today?
The resilience that Larisa Savitskaya demonstrated in our conversation is the foundation upon which she rebuilt her life. After the accident, she faced a long physical and psychological recovery. Without state support, she immersed herself in the study of psychophysiology to understand her own trauma and even used her knowledge to help war veterans.
Years later, she married again, had a son, Georgy, and is now a grandmother. The woman who survived the impossible found a new meaning in life, a journey that, as she told us herself, teaches one to “not be afraid of life.”
