Mohammed Ali Naqvi at The Yarrow Theatre on January 22, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)
By Cecilia Santini
Hanging by a Wire, the nail-biting new documentary from director Mohammed Ali Naqvi, chronicles a single terrifying day in August 2023 when eight people were trapped in a cable car suspended 900 feet in the air in the mountains of northern Pakistan.
Because of the lack of infrastructure in the remote mountain village of Allai, residents rely on cable cars suspended high in the air to travel. These cars aren’t maintained by the government, and conditions can be perilous. One morning, while eight people — six of them boys on the way to school — were on a routine journey in a car, a cable snapped, leaving the car dangling in midair, suspended from a single wire. Some estimated the cable could only hold for 12 hours before giving way.
The film, which is screening in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition, relates the intense hours that ensued. As the world’s attention turns to this small mountain community, we follow a group of people who worked to facilitate a rescue: the fathers of some of the boys, a journalist covering the story, the district police chief coordinating rescue efforts, a helicopter pilot, a cable car operator, and two zipliners. Together they recount an unforgettable day.
After the film’s January 22 premiere at The Yarrow Theatre, director Naqvi explained how the crew worked with the local village community to tell the story. “We had essentially what you call a tribal council with all the families, all the kids, the entire community. … We didn’t just want to make this movie with them, we wanted to have them co-author it,” Naqvi says. “[There’s] no infrastructure, but everyone has TikTok, everyone has Instagram, everyone has Facebook. … All this stuff you see, it’s all stuff we got from them.”
Umraiz Khan, the father of one of the boys trapped in the car, brought this point home. He called into the screening via Zoom along with other community members, receiving a warm reception from the Festival crowd. “We got together and we decided that our area was hidden behind a curtain or a veil, and it was important for us to tell our story, to tell our truth,” Khan says. “Because maybe if our story resonated with someone out there, it could change [things], and it could help us get those facilities and get that development that we’re looking for.”
Editor Will Grayburn brilliantly weaves footage sourced from the community into a suspenseful narrative. The film unfolds like a thriller, moving between interviews, stunning drone videos taken by a bystander, cell phone recordings from onlookers and those trapped inside the car, dramatic reconstructions performed by the actual participants, and news broadcasts. Tensions rise on the ground as family members and hundreds of villagers grow increasingly angry at delayed and unsuccessful rescue attempts, and locals disagree with government officials about the best way to try to save the eight people.
The film honors the resourcefulness and dedication of the local village community, along with the work of everyone who participated in the rescue effort. “It’s been these happy accidents of finding people from the community who actually do citizen journalism,” producer Bilal Sami explains. “Loads of people who want their story to be out there and who want to tell their own problems and whatever’s going on in their area. And everybody wanted us to tell this story.”
