© Abramorama
Hanging by a Wire (2026)
Hanging by a Wire (2026)
American kids go to school in yellow buses. In one village in mountainous northern Pakistan, the children take a cable car that spans an impassible ravine. In 2023, two of the three cables supporting the jerry-rigged ride snapped on the way to school, leaving two adults and six middle-high school boys trapped midway. Hanging by a Wire is the story of the daring efforts to bring them home.
The documentary’s Pakistani American director, Mohammed Ali Naqvi, has a wealth of visual material to work with. Thanks to cell phones, ubiquitous even in the world’s remotest parts, Naqvi not only can show the response of families, friends and the authorities, but take the story close up and into the precarious cable car. Editor William Grayburn must be commended for the seamless flow and agreeable pace. Surely a few moments, especially the audio (that dangerously creaking sound of cables about to break) must have been recreated? If so, they are blended easily into the actual footage.
One of the film’s stars is a Pakistani television reporter who broke the story, which for its cliff-hanging reality was picked up by CNN and CBS, the BBC and beyond. Interviewed by Naqvi for the documentary, she accused the authorities of indifference to the plight of remote villagers—unless the eyes of the world are on them. One of the documentary’s surprises is the chief of the regional police, a woman in a society so male-dominated that we the schoolboys’ fathers, not their mothers, are the principal spokespeople for the frightened families.
How to rescue the occupants clinging to the cable car’s interior? Brave villagers tried to scramble across the remaining cable. One boy was rescue in that way, but as the police chief tells Naqvi, those efforts endangered the rescuers and the children. Army helicopters arrived in what was also a dangerous operation, given that the whirring, rotating blades could upset the cable car, and a too-close encounter could sever the cable. The copter managed to retrieve one boy before the sun went down.
Hanging by a Wire is a Hollywood style production, complete with ominous musical crescendos and periodic time checks: SIX HOURS STRANDED … Naqvi successfully manipulates the suspense despite the known ending of a widely covered news story. Hanging by a Wire includes many interviews with the villagers and eventually some of the boys, in testimonies on the power of family and faith.
Hanging by a Wire will screen 1 p.m. October 3 at the Oriental Theatre as part of the 11thth Annual Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival. For tickets and information, visit mkefilm.org.
