‘When We Come Together, We Can Move Mountains’

The accident immediately drew the attention of the local people. Many, who were social media savvy, began to shoot reels that they posted online. The reels caught the attention of authorities, Pakistani and even international media, and major efforts were made to rescue the passengers.

Now Mohammed ‘Mo’ Ali Naqvi, a Pakistani American documentary filmmaker has made a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat documentary about the rescue efforts. His film Hanging By The Wire recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Naqvi’s previous works have included Insha’Allah Democracy (2017), where he focused on a national level election in which he had the choice to vote for the religious right or the late military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, who portrayed himself as a secular liberal.

In 2015, he made Among The Believers, the story of the radical Islamic Lal Masjid in Islamabad. He co-directed the film with the Indian American filmmaker Hemal Trivedi.

Naqvi spoke to Aseem Chhabra about the making of Hanging By The Wire from Park City, Utah, and said, “It is literally the story of Pakistan, where you have fantastically different people, the media, the army, the government. And they all had to work together to save these kids. When we come together, we can move mountains.”

Mo, you had said something while introducing your film at one of the Sundance screenings. Usually, many of documentaries that come from, I think you said the Global South, Pakistan and India especially, relate to poverty, religious fanaticism, corruption, caste issues, etc.
When you go to raise funds, what are the expectations from the producers and financiers?

I have been doing this for almost 20 years. I am very proud of our work. There is an activist bent in me, even in this film. I like to fight against oppression and hold people accountable. That I certainly did amongst the political right or the fascist religious extremists, in different forms in Pakistan and beyond Pakistan. This was so even when I was doing the Netflix series (co-executive producer of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, 2024). That is my North Star.

At a certain point, you have to realise in the documentaries you are making that you are challenging people who are oppressors, or you are empowering and amplifying victims’ voices. On the other hand, you are also perpetuating a colonialist lens, and that becomes a problem.

I wanted to fight, especially now, that ecosystem, so I deliberately went into a Hollywood style thriller. Mujhe yeh hi karna tha.

Because this is the opposite of what is expected from the Global South. This is what you have to make. And I am like, no, I am not going to show just victims all the time. I want to show people who have agency.

I want to show bearded men actually caring and loving for their sons or a woman from Pakistan in a position of power. How radical is that?

I don’t want to sit there and give you the context and justify it. They put the burden on us of explaining ourselves and justifying who we are. It’s actually justifying our colonial masters, our existence and why we are so.

So I made this film.

I really appreciate what you said. But having said that, you still show the state of affairs in Pakistan, the reality. I guess poverty is the right word because these boys have no other way to travel. There are no roads to take them. It’s a broken-down system and takes the government a while to respond.

Yes, obviously there were structural failures. I didn’t need to get into that. But I could have made a very different film. I could have made a film that’s ethnographic and goes into the infrastructure failures, etc.

This village is about 50 kilometres away from the closest town. It took us four-and-a-half hours in the most treacherous ride up the mountains (to reach there). It was a hundreds of years old dirt road.

If the jeep moved even an inch away from the path, we would have fallen off the mountain.

When I got there, they were living at a time that was hundreds of years old. There were no roads. These people were using cable cars that they built themselves. That was their lifeline.

However, everyone had Instagram and Facebook accounts. One guy even had a drone. They understood the power of social media and hoped the authorities would take notice. And they did. Even the international media took notice.

When we went to them, we wanted to make something beyond just a news story. We wanted to amplify their story. I didn’t want to show them just as victims because they weren’t. They had full agency. I would say they were co-authors of this film because more than half my film is the archival footage which I got from them.

You know how we got the drone footage? My producer, Bilal Sami, met a jewellery shop owner, who is a YouTube drone videos enthusiast. On the day of the accident, he sat there for three hours and managed to take 50 minutes plus of immaculate drone footage.

So it was their footage. It was their own visions of that day and we crafted that together.

Later, I worked with the subjects to recreate their own memories. People often shy away from recreations. But in this, it made sense because the whole day was a live performance. The whole thing was unfurling live on television and on social media. It was like a Bertolt Brecht approach. I used the people who performed live to do a performance of their memories for the camera and me.

We built a version of the cable car in a studio in Lahore. It was based on the boys’ interviews and testimonies in Lahore. Obviously, it was a safe, controlled environment. We didn’t want to put them 900 feet above the ground, and they actually directed the scenes with me. They told me about everything, and then they re-enacted their own performances. So they had full agency in telling their own story.

We are now working with a non-profit organisation in the US called One Good Act where we are raising funds to build a proper functioning cable car for the village.

Has the government built any more cable cars or has any change come for the kids?

Pakistan is obviously working in its own capacity to build infrastructure in different areas. There are also private landowners in that area who are not always compliant with the government. So unfortunately, this stops a lot of the infrastructure development.

But what we can do with this film is at least bring some attention to this area and to this problem, and hopefully, amplify this community’s and the larger community’s voices.

Did you sense that the boys who were stuck in the cable car had some PTSD trauma?

I am not some therapist. I can’t diagnose them. Ultimately, this is the reality for them. Over there, whether they like it not, they still use the cable cars because you don’t have any choice.

We didn’t do any recreations or reconstructions with them until November 2025. I spent a good amount of time, like a year-and-a-0half, just getting to know them, interviewing them again and again.

I was very careful and wanted to have their blessing, their consent, and have them participate in creating this cable car, making sure that they were okay with it. For some of them, it’s a difficult memory, but I imagine most of them have grown out of it.

Were you in the US when this happened?

Bilal, my producer, and I were in the US. But we were following the story on social media. It was an hour-by-hour breakdown. Immediately, I knew I had to make this because it was so exciting. We made contact, went to the village, met some of the people involved, including the rescuers. We found they were such amazing, compelling characters.

I keep saying, the inspiration for this film is all action films that I grew up on in the ’80s and ’90s — Die Hard, Cliffhanger, The Goonies, all Hollywood ensemble dramas.

I wanted to make a documentary film for beyond the documentary audiences. I wanted to make like a mainstream film, make it accessible to the world. It happens to take place in Pakistan, but really, it could be anywhere in the US as well.

What is the state of theatrical release of documentaries in Pakistan?

Inshallah, I hope this film will get theatrical release in the US and other western countries. But 100%, we will release this in Pakistan. I would love to show it across South Asia.

How did the Sundance audiences react to a story coming out of Pakistan?

Overall, everyone has been awesome. I am not saying this because I made the film, but it’s so fun to see a movie like this. They were cheering, clapping. Everyone was on the edge of their seats. They had never seen a film that’s a documentary, but also in the thriller action genre, and from our neck of the woods.

I am not saying that films about catastrophes or human tragedies don’t have to exist. But to only make those stories is telling one very specific facet of how we are as a people.

Would you only want to make films set in Pakistan?

I do other projects too, such as the Netflix series on the Cold War. But I am from Pakistan. I will always be drawn to stories from there because I grew up there. Our stories are so compelling.

This film is such a complex and fascinating yarn. It is literally the story of Pakistan, where you have fantastically different people, the media, the army, the government. And they all had to work together to save these kids.

When we come together, we can move mountains.