Pakistan has selected Hanging by a Wire, a documentary by filmmaker Mohammed Ali Naqvi, as its official entry for the Best International Feature Film race at the 2027 Academy Awards.
The selection gives the film a place in one of the most closely watched stages of international cinema and marks a significant moment for Pakistan’s documentary filmmaking. The film revisits the dramatic 2023 cable car emergency in Battagram, northern Pakistan, when a group of schoolchildren became trapped high above a ravine after the cable system failed.
Rather than treating the incident simply as a news event, Hanging by a Wire reconstructs the ordeal through eyewitness accounts, surviving footage and cinematic storytelling, bringing viewers back to the hours when the children’s survival remained uncertain.
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is written and produced by Naqvi and Bilal Sami.
A Rescue That Captured Pakistan’s Attention
The events depicted in the documentary unfolded in August 2023 in Battagram, a mountainous district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Six schoolboys were travelling to school in a cable car when one of its cables snapped, leaving the vehicle suspended roughly 900 feet above a ravine. The children were suddenly isolated in an extremely vulnerable position with the damaged gondola hanging over a steep landscape.
The rescue operation quickly became a national story.
Television coverage and mobile-phone footage brought images of the stranded children into homes across Pakistan, while the dangerous terrain made the rescue itself a complicated operation. The incident also attracted international attention as rescuers worked to reach the children without causing the precariously suspended cable car to fall.
For many Pakistanis, the images became an unforgettable part of the country’s news cycle in 2023.
Hanging by a Wire returns to that moment with the benefit of distance, allowing the story to be examined not only as a rescue operation but also as a human experience involving fear, uncertainty, courage and survival.
Turning News Footage Into Cinema
One of the documentary’s defining elements is its use of real material from the incident.
The filmmakers combine eyewitness footage and recordings captured during the rescue with interviews and reconstructed sequences. This approach allows the film to move between documentary evidence and a more cinematic representation of what the people involved experienced.
Images recorded from the ground and aerial perspectives help convey the extraordinary height of the cable car and the isolation of the passengers suspended above the valley.
That visual contrast is particularly important to the film’s storytelling. The surrounding landscape is vast and striking, but its beauty also emphasises how vulnerable the stranded children were.
Instead of relying entirely on narration to explain the crisis, the documentary allows the footage and testimony to communicate the scale of the situation.
The result is a story in which a familiar news event becomes a more intimate account of people confronting an extraordinary emergency.
Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Documentary Approach
Naqvi has built a body of work around subjects that connect individual experiences with larger social and political realities.
With Hanging by a Wire, his focus is considerably more concentrated: a single event, a small group of young people and a rescue effort that became a national spectacle.
The documentary’s construction reflects the challenges involved in turning a widely reported incident into a feature-length film. Audiences may already know the broad outline of what happened but the filmmakers must create enough context and emotional depth to make the story meaningful beyond its original headlines.
That is where firsthand testimony becomes important.
The documentary brings together people connected to the emergency and combines their accounts with the footage that documented the rescue. This allows viewers to experience the event from several perspectives rather than relying solely on the retrospective explanation of one narrator.
From Sundance to the Oscars Race
The film’s selection by Pakistan comes after its appearance at Sundance, one of the world’s major platforms for independent cinema and documentary filmmaking.
An Oscar submission does not automatically mean a film becomes an Academy Award nominee. Countries select their entries for the international feature category, after which the Academy considers submissions from around the world through its awards process.
That distinction makes Pakistan’s selection an important first step rather than a guarantee of a nomination.
For Hanging by a Wire, however, the Oscar campaign offers an opportunity to introduce a Pakistani documentary to a substantially wider international audience.
Documentaries from Pakistan have often struggled to receive the same international exposure as major commercial productions. A selection for the Academy Awards can potentially increase attention from distributors, programmers, critics and audiences who may otherwise never encounter the film.
Why the Story Matters Beyond the Rescue
The appeal of Hanging by a Wire is rooted in the immediacy of its central event, but the circumstances surrounding the rescue also raise broader questions about infrastructure, safety and the realities of life in mountainous communities.
Cable transport systems are used in parts of northern Pakistan where difficult terrain can make conventional road access challenging. For communities in remote areas, such systems can serve as important links between villages, schools and surrounding towns.
The Battagram incident therefore became more than a story about a dramatic rescue. It also drew attention to the conditions under which people travel in areas where geography presents daily challenges.
The documentary does not need to turn the event into a political argument for its human dimension to be understood. The image of children suspended hundreds of feet above a ravine is powerful enough on its own.
What cinema can add is time: time to hear from people who witnessed the incident, revisit the images and understand how an extraordinary emergency unfolded.
Pakistan’s Documentary Moment
The selection also highlights the growing potential of documentary filmmaking in Pakistan.
The country’s cinema industry has produced feature films across a range of genres but documentaries can provide a different route into international film festivals and global conversations. Real events, social issues and human stories can travel across cultural boundaries when they are told with strong visual language and compelling characters.
Hanging by a Wire has an advantage in that respect. Its central event was already witnessed by millions but its documentary treatment offers an opportunity to revisit the story through a more carefully constructed cinematic lens.
For international viewers unfamiliar with Battagram or the communities of northern Pakistan, the film can also provide a window into a landscape and a way of life rarely represented in mainstream global cinema.
When a News Story Becomes a Human Story
The most enduring stories are often those that move beyond the headline.
In 2023, the Battagram cable car emergency was primarily a race against time. Viewers waited for updates, watched rescue attempts and hoped the children would survive.
Three years later, Hanging by a Wire approaches the same event as a piece of cinema.
Its Oscar submission gives the story another life this time not through breaking-news coverage, but through filmmaking.
Whether the documentary ultimately reaches the final Academy Award nominations will be decided through the Academy’s selection process. For now, its designation as Pakistan’s entry gives the film a new international platform and places a remarkable Pakistani rescue story before one of the world’s largest film audiences.
For Pakistani cinema, the significance may extend beyond one film. It demonstrates how real events from the country can become compelling international stories when filmmakers preserve their human detail and give them the cinematic treatment they deserve.
Rafia Batool
About Author:
The author writes about food safety, cultural issues and well-being focusing on raising awareness about healthy practices, cultural understanding and public health. Their work aims to educate readers and promote safer, healthier and more informed communities.
Keywords: Pakistan Oscars 2027, Hanging by a Wire, Mohammed Ali Naqvi, Pakistan Oscar entry, 2027 Academy Awards, Pakistani documentary, Battagram cable car rescue, Sundance, Oscars international feature film, Pakistan cinema
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