Is Hanging by a Wire a true story? Where the footage inside the cable car actually came from
Every once in a while a documentary comes along that plays like a disaster thriller some studio exec would reject as "too much." Hanging by a Wire is that documentary.
And yes — before you ask — every frame of it is real. Painfully, sweatily real.
The morning everything snapped
On August 22, 2023, in the Battagram district of northern Pakistan, eight people — six of them schoolboys on their way to class — boarded a homemade cable car strung across a ravine. Midway across, two of the three cables gave out. The gondola lurched, dropped, and settled into the world's worst waiting room: dangling roughly 900 feet above the ground, held up by one damaged wire.
What followed was a 14-hour rescue that played out live on national TV and social media, with helicopters whipping up dangerous downdrafts, daylight running out, and an improvised crew of local heroes — including a cable car repairman his neighbors call the "sky pirate" — rigging ziplines to reach the passengers. Director Mohammed Ali Naqvi turned all of it into the film that premiered on opening day of Sundance, and he wasn't shy about the genre he was working in. Speaking to Variety, he compared it to Cliffhanger and The Goonies and said, "This is like a full-on, Hollywood-style action thriller."
A real-life ticking-clock rescue movie where the stunt doubles are just... the actual people.
Okay, but who was filming inside a dangling cable car?
Here's the part that got me. The most intimate footage in the film — the stuff shot inside the gondola while it hung by a literal thread — wasn't captured by some embedded camera crew with a death wish.
It came from the boys themselves. The trapped passengers had phones, and they filmed their own ordeal while the entire community below did the same. The film is stitched together from:
- phone videos shot by the passengers inside the cable car;
- footage from onlookers and rescuers on the ground, since basically the whole town showed up and hit record;
- drone shots creeping toward the dangling car;
- news broadcasts, because the rescue was live national television;
- reenactments — performed not by actors, but by the actual rescuers and villagers, mostly to cover the nighttime portions where usable footage didn't exist.
Before shooting anything, Naqvi gathered the families and the wider community and asked them to co-author the film rather than just sign off on it — a process described in Hyphen's coverage as the community piecing its own experience back together, rather than an outsider reconstructing it for them.
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The rescuers deserve their own franchise
The ad hoc rescue squad is, frankly, a perfect ensemble cast: the "sky pirate" Sahib Khan, zipline expert Muhammad Ali Swati (big muscles, high-quality gear, zero hesitation), and district police chief Sonia Shamroz, who would have taken the fall if any of it went wrong. Naqvi told Deadline the story is told through these first responders: "They risk it all to save these kids."
The kids filmed their own rescue. The town filmed the kids. The film is the town's home movie of the worst day of its life.
So: true story, real footage, real people re-living it on camera. If your palms aren't sweating by the third act, please see a doctor about your circulation.
Previously we wrote: The A24 SCP Foundation V/H/S movie backlash, explained: the studio bought "worldwide rights" to something no one can own
