Pakistan sends a documentary, Hanging by a Wire, to the Oscars

Pakistan has entered a documentary in the Oscar race for the international feature film. The Pakistan Academy Selection Committee chose Mohammed Ali Naqvi's Hanging by a Wire, about the August 2023 cable-car emergency in Battagram, in which eight people, six of them schoolboys, were left hanging after a cable snapped. Sana Zahra Jafri, deputy chair of the committee, announced the selection. Variety carried it as an exclusive on 2 October. Dawn reported it on Saturday as the country's Oscar entry.

The category is Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards. Documentaries usually compete in the documentary categories. A country may submit one film for the international feature, and that film can be a documentary if the national committee picks it. Pakistan had not done so before. Jafri called the choice a milestone for Pakistani documentary filmmaking and said the film took an extraordinary story from northern Pakistan into that race. Naqvi told Deadline he was honoured by the selection and grateful to the committee.

The event on screen is specific. In August 2023 a cable car on a ravine crossing in Battagram, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, failed. Variety and the Express Tribune put the height at roughly 900 feet and the passengers at eight, including six schoolboys on the way to school. A later Pakistani report put the height nearer 600 feet and the children at seven. The rescue account that both versions share is that the car hung for close to 12 hours, that the operation was followed live in Pakistan, and that all eight people were brought down alive. The film uses eyewitness footage, survivor interviews and reconstructions with people who were in the rescue. Naqvi directed. He and Bilal Sami wrote and produced it.

The production companies are EverWonder Studio, Universal Pictures Content Group, Mindhouse Productions and 64th Street Media. Dogwoof has UK theatrical rights. Abramorama is handling the US theatrical release. Paramount+ is set to stream the film on 28 October. It premiered at Sundance in 2026 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition and played at Tribeca later in the year. A Pakistan theatrical date has not been announced. The Oscar submission does not require a Pakistani release before the committee vote, but the stream date on 28 October puts the film in front of voters and ordinary subscribers in the same month the shortlist process runs.

Naqvi had been chair of the selection body. For this cycle he stepped down so his own film could be submitted. Jafri headed the committee. The members, as listed in the announcement coverage, included actors Marina Khan and Hina Bayat, artist Misha Japanwala, director Nabeel Qureshi, actress Tamkenat Mansoor, director-producer Shahzad Rafique and producer Badar Ikram. A chair stepping aside is the ordinary conflict rule. It also means the vote that picked the film was not taken by its director.

Jafri said at the film's premiere at the Mosaic International Film Festival in Canada, where the choice was made public on 1 October, that the film captured something recognisable about Pakistanis. That is a programmer's sentence. The verifiable claim under it is narrower: a national committee has, for the first time, used its single international-feature slot on a documentary, and the documentary is about a rescue whose duration, passenger count and outcome are on the public record. The Academy will decide later whether the film reaches the shortlist. The selection itself is the fact that changed on 1 October.

Pakistan's previous international-feature entries have been fiction features. A documentary in the slot changes what a Pakistani submission is expected to be. It also puts the Battagram rescue, already seen live in 2023, back in front of an awards calendar three years later, with a stream date attached. Voters who did not watch the cable car on a phone in August 2023 can watch the reconstruction from 28 October.