Oscars: Pakistan Picks ‘Hanging By A Wire’ As Best Int’ Feature Entry

Pakistan has selected Mo Naqvi’s nonfiction action thriller Hanging By a Wire as its official entry for Best International Film at the Academy Awards, the first time the country has chosen a documentary for that distinction.

The film captures the drama and suspense around a news event that captured the world’s attention in 2023: the desperate attempt to save six school kids and two adults stranded in a cable car 900 feet above the ground, in a remote area of Northern Pakistan. The kids and adults were nearly hurled out of the car after a cable snapped, leaving them, as the film’s title indicates, hanging by a wire.

“Directed by Naqvi, and written and produced by Naqvi and Bilal Sami, the film revisits the August 2023 cable car emergency in Battagram, northern Pakistan,” notes a release announcing the film’s selection for the Best International Film category. “Combining eyewitness footage, survivor testimony and cinematic reconstructions featuring participants in the rescue, Hanging by a Wire unfolds as a documentary thriller.”

The documentary premiered in World Cinema Documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It has gone on to screen at Tribeca Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. Next Friday, it plays at the 23^rd annual Bend Film Festival in Oregon.

“I’m honored that Hanging by a Wire has been selected to represent Pakistan in the International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, and grateful to the Pakistan Academy Selection Committee,” Naqvi tells Deadline exclusively. “It’s a straight-up disaster film, except it really happened, and you’re watching real footage of it unfolding live. The community on the ground filmed it themselves and trusted me with that footage, so in a real sense they co-authored this film with me. How resilient and resourceful they were, both in the rescue and in documenting it, is what the film is about, and there’s nothing more Pakistani than that.”

Hanging By a Wire is produced by EverWonder Studio, Universal Pictures Content Group, Mindhouse Productions and 64th Street Media. Its theatrical distribution is handled by Dogwoof in the U.K. and Abramorama in the U.S., with a Paramount+ streaming release set for later this month.

There are no “proper roads” in the area where the incident took place, Naqvi explained in a Meet the Filmmaker video posted by Sundance. “The way people get around in the mountains is by using makeshift cable cars. And it is so dangerous.” His Sundance Filmmaker video showed him on board one of the cable cars, only a crisscross metal gate separating him falling to the earth below. “During location scouting, I did this stupid thing of taking one.”

Hanging By a Wire foregrounds an ad hoc group of locals who attempted to stage a rescue, including Sahib Khan, a cable car repairman known in his community as a “sky pirate” for his aerial exploits. Another of the rescuers, dashing Ali Swati who had access to high-quality zipline equipment, also sprang to the aid of the cable car passengers. The Pakistani official who ultimately oversaw the operation – and the likely fall person if the mission went awry — was the forceful Sonia Shamroz, “the district’s no-nonsense head of police.”

Sana Zahra Jafri, deputy chairperson of the Pakistan Academy Selection Committee, commented, “The selection marks a historic milestone for Pakistani documentary filmmaking and brings an extraordinary story from northern Pakistan to the International Feature Film Oscar race.”