Pakistan has picked the documentary “Hanging by a Wire” as its official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards — the first time a documentary has ever represented the country in that race.
The film, directed by Mohammed Ali Naqvi and written and produced by Naqvi with Bilal Sami, reconstructs the August 2023 cable car emergency in Battagram, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in which eight people — including six schoolchildren on their way to school — were left stranded roughly 900 feet above a ravine after the cable snapped. The hours-long rescue was broadcast live across Pakistan and drew international attention at the time. The documentary builds its account from footage filmed by people on the ground, survivor testimony, and reenactments involving some of the actual rescuers.
Pakistan’s Academy Selection Committee, which includes figures such as Marina Khan, Hina Bayat, Misha Japanwala, Nabeel Qureshi, Tamkenat Mansoor, Shahzad Rafique and Badar Ikram, announced the pick this week. Sana Zahra Jafri, the committee’s deputy chairperson, called it a historic moment for the country’s documentary filmmaking, saying she “felt that the film captures something deeply recognisable about us as Pakistanis.”
“It’s a straight-up disaster film, except it really happened, and you’re watching real footage of it unfolding live,” director Mohammed Ali Naqvi said of the documentary.
Naqvi added that the film has already travelled widely on the festival circuit: “Wherever we have screened the film so far — at Sundance, Tribeca, Sydney, Australia, and London, UK — audiences have received it with great enthusiasm.” “Hanging by a Wire” premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance in 2026 before screening at Tribeca and other festivals, and is set to begin streaming on Paramount+ from October 28.
- What it’s about: the August 2023 Battagram cable car rescue in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- Director: Mohammed Ali Naqvi; written and produced with Bilal Sami
- Category: Best International Feature Film, 99th Academy Awards
- Significance: first documentary ever submitted by Pakistan in this category
- Where to watch: streaming on Paramount+ from October 28, 2026
The selection also reopens a long and so far fruitless chapter in Pakistani cinema’s relationship with the Academy Awards. The country has submitted 13 films in the Best International Feature category since 1959 without ever landing a nomination. The closest any Pakistani film has come was Saim Sadiq’s “Joyland” in 2022, which made the shortlist but not the final five. Whether a documentary built around amateur, in-the-moment footage can do better than two decades of scripted dramas remains to be seen once Academy voting gets underway.
Our Opinion
Sending a documentary built from phone footage and survivor testimony, rather than another polished drama, is a notable shift in how Pakistan chooses to present itself to Academy voters — it bets on raw, verifiable reality over the festival-friendly fiction that has defined most of the country’s 13 previous submissions; the Battagram rescue was already a story Pakistanis lived through collectively on live television, so turning it into the national Oscar entry is as much a statement about what this moment meant to the country as it is a film selection, and whether that resonates with Academy voters the way it clearly has with festival audiences in Sundance, Tribeca and beyond is the real test still to come.
