Hanging by a Wire, the documentary about the 2023 Battagram cable car rescue and the first documentary ever selected as Pakistan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, began streaming on Paramount+ today, Wednesday 28 October. Directed by Mohammed Ali Naqvi, the film retells the day eight people, six of them schoolboys, were left dangling 900 feet above a ravine in northern Pakistan, and the whole country stopped to watch their rescue.
The Day Pakistan Held Its Breath
On the morning of 22 August 2023, six schoolboys and two adults boarded a cable car, known locally as a dolly, for the ordinary journey across the valley near Battagram in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Halfway across, two of the car’s three cables snapped. The car stopped mid-air, tilted, and hung there for more than twelve hours while rescue teams tried everything: army helicopters battled high winds, and local rescuers eventually crossed on ziplines to bring the passengers down one by one. By nightfall, all eight had been rescued alive, in an operation watched live on television and phone screens around the world.
For families in the mountains of northern Pakistan, the cable car is not a thrill ride. It is the school run, the trip to the shops, the only practical way across valleys where roads do not reach, a way of life also captured in the valleys listed on our Beautiful Pakistan page. That is what gives the film its charge: the people in the car were not adventurers, they were children going to school.
How Hanging by a Wire Was Made
Naqvi, whose earlier work includes Netflix’s Turning Point series, co-wrote and co-produced the film with Bilal Sami, with cinematography by Brendan McGinty and music by Sven Faulconer. The film is a co-production of the United Kingdom, Pakistan and the United States, made by Universal Pictures, EverWonder Studio, Mindhouse Productions and 64th Street Media, and spoken in English, Urdu and Pashto.
Rather than retelling the rescue from a studio, the filmmakers built it from eyewitness footage shot on the day, testimony from survivors, and staged reenactments involving people who took part in the rescue itself. The Guardian praised the result as a tense, skilfully assembled survival story with unexpected flashes of comedy, and the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes records 87 percent positive reviews from critics. Pakistan has form in this awards season: the short film The Last Glance recently qualified for the Oscars longlist, and both stories sit in the wider collection on our positive news Pakistan page.
Critics have mostly been kind. The Playlist called it a nail-biting watch that never gets bogged down in setup, comparing the grip of the story to the Copiapo mining rescue. The Hollywood Reporter praised the stitching together of real footage, from fuzzy phone videos to drone shots looking down at the stranded car, even while wanting more context. The film also has serious distribution behind it: Abramorama is releasing it in the United States and Dogwoof, the British documentary specialist, is handling the United Kingdom theatrical release, which is how a story from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ends up on cinema screens in London and New York.
A Festival Run That Ended at the Oscars’ Door
Hanging by a Wire premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival on 22 January 2026, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. It went on to screen at the Seattle International Film Festival in May, the Sydney Film Festival in June and the Tribeca Festival in New York. In October it won the Sabeen Mahmud Award for Courage in Cinema at the Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival in Canada. The film was released on digital platforms on 13 October, and its arrival on Paramount+ today is its biggest release yet.
The Oscar selection is the historic part. Pakistan has been submitting films for Best International Feature since 1959 and has never received a nomination; Saim Sadiq’s Joyland came closest, reaching the shortlist in 2022. No documentary had ever been chosen as Pakistan’s entry before Hanging by a Wire. Whether or not it advances, a true story from Battagram, told largely by the people who lived it, is now carrying Pakistan’s name through the awards season, and from today it can be watched at home.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Hanging by a Wire, film details, release history and reception
- Pakistan TV: Hanging by a Wire, Pakistan submits documentary as historic Oscar submission
- Soap Central: What really happened during the 2023 Battagram cable car incident
- Photo: A cable car crosses above the Neelum River in Azad Kashmir, the same kind of mountain lift used by schoolchildren across northern Pakistan (Photo: Engineerographer via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.