In Conversation With: Mohammed Ali Naqvi

There’s an extensive archive of mobile phone and broadcast footage filmed by local onlookers and news outlets while the rescue was taking place. What led you to include reenactments alongside this material?

When I first met Ataullah, one of the survivors, said to me has never left me: “While we were being rescued, our story was being reported live and internationally. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be alive today.”

A few weeks after the rescue, I travelled to his village and began to understand exactly what he meant. Arriving there felt like stepping back three or four hundred years. There were no roads and almost no basic infrastructure. Yet people had smartphones, TikTok, Instagram and access to social media. In a place the state had largely failed to reach, the recorded image had become a form of power. The community understood that if they wanted the outside world to see them—and to respond—they had to document and circulate their own story.

That is why such an astonishing archive of the rescue exists. Families, local onlookers, rescuers and even the boys themselves recorded what was happening. They gave us their mobile-phone footage, alongside the broadcast material and the extraordinary drone images of the boys suspended inside the cable car. The community had generated the visual record themselves. Our guiding creative principle became: the archive is the hero.

But once the boys were saved, the attention vanished. The cameras left and the village remained exactly as it had been. The community wanted their story to survive beyond a single news cycle. They wanted a film. That desire became the basis of our co-authorship.

The archive always remained our hero footage. Where it became sparse—principally after nightfall, when darkness left significant visual gaps—we used reenactments only as cinematic coverage for the archival record. We cast no actors. The people who lived through the rescue reconstructed their own memories. Inside the recreated gondola, the boys showed us where everyone had been sitting, how they moved and what unfolded moment by moment. The rescuers physically retraced their own actions.

The reenactments never replaced the archive. They grew directly from the community’s testimony, filling the moments the cameras could not capture while extending the community’s authorship of its own story.

The footage you capture is awe-inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. How was the experience of filming on location in the valley?

The journey into the valley tells you almost everything. The village is only about 50 kilometres from the nearest town, but it took us nearly four hours to reach it. The road is cracked, eroding and carved directly into the mountainside, barely wide enough for a jeep. At certain points, being only a few inches off course could send you plunging thousands of feet into the ravine.

Then you arrive in one of the most breathtaking landscapes imaginable. The scale of the mountains is extraordinary, but the beauty is inseparable from the isolation. There are no safe roads, no reliable transportation and almost no formal infrastructure. A journey from one mountaintop to another takes roughly 40 seconds by cable car; without it, people face a two-and-a-half-hour walk through treacherous mountain paths and ravines. These cable cars are not novelties. They are lifelines, used to reach school, food and medical care. For us, navigating that terrain was an enormous production challenge. For the people living there, it is daily life.

Our entire crew essentially camped out because the region was so remote. Filming required multiple units operating across both sides of the valley, transporting equipment over mountain passes, working with local riggers and coordinating drone and high-angle photography around extreme terrain, altitude and weather. Yet the community was extraordinarily warm, hospitable and generous with us throughout.

During some of the nighttime recreations, we worked with two or three hundred local people—not conventional extras, but the actual villagers returning to where they had stood that night and reconstructing what they remembered. For a documentary, the scale was astonishing. At moments, it felt as though I were directing a scripted action feature, except everything remained rooted in the memories of the people who had lived through it.

Every wide shot seemed to contain the film’s central contradiction: immense natural beauty alongside profound abandonment. The landscape was not simply a backdrop to the story—it created the conditions that made the disaster possible.

The film plays out like a thriller, but what ultimately emerges is a story of community – the combined efforts of the rescuers working together to get the boys to safety. Could you talk a little about framing the story in this way?

My framing of the story was deliberate from the beginning. I had no interest in making a solemn, didactic film about poverty or failed infrastructure that positioned this community as a collection of victims. Stories from our part of the world are so often filtered through a Western colonial gaze in which suffering becomes our primary claim to value. I wanted to rebel against that.

Instead, I chose to reappropriate the conventions of the Hollywood action-adventure film: a ragtag group of unlikely characters who clash, improvise and eventually come together to accomplish something impossible. Here, that convention is placed at the centre of a story about an indigenous mountain community in northern Pakistan. The rescuers include local people and others who arrive from elsewhere in Pakistan, but this is not a story in which salvation comes from outside the country. The solution emerges through local knowledge, ingenuity and people from different parts of Pakistan learning to work together.

Formally, I privileged a visceral experience and the grammar of a thriller over the paternalistic mode of nonfiction storytelling so often imposed upon filmmakers from the Global South. We are constantly expected to explain ourselves, translate ourselves and make every person and cultural detail legible to a Western audience. The film becomes chock-full of context until the story—and certainly the suspense—disappears. That freedom to experiment with genre has historically been afforded far more readily to Western filmmakers. I wanted to claim it for myself.

I also did not want to sentimentalise community. These people have different motivations, competing egos and every reason to distrust one another. A working-class cable-car repairman is dismissed because he lacks status. A female police chief must assert authority within a patriarchal system. A swaggering zip-line operator is desperate to prove himself. Their collaboration is uneasy and must be earned.

No single heroic figure saves the boys. Each person holds only part of the solution, and the rescue succeeds only when they work collectively. Reframing them not as victims but as action heroes—with agency, humour, flaws and extraordinary capability—was the film’s central act of subversion.

Has renewed publicity around the film’s release had any impact on plans to replace the cable car in Battagram?

The encouraging news is that, as the film begins its release, we are already working with the Seattle-based nonprofit One Good Act Impact and members of the community on a substantial impact campaign. The priorities currently being developed include supporting the boys’ education, providing business grants for other people involved in the rescue, and securing professional certification, additional training and equipment for the local rescuers. We are also exploring a medical dispensary and other small but meaningful infrastructure projects for the valley.

The original cable car has not yet been replaced, but one of the larger possibilities under consideration is a feasibility study for a properly engineered, safe cable-car system or a walkable bridge connecting the communities.

These plans are still in development, and I don’t want to claim an impact before it has happened. The film’s release is only beginning. We hope that as it moves theatrically through North America, the UK and Ireland—and later reaches audiences through its streaming release and beyond in Asia and Europe—we can build the partnerships, resources and sustained public attention needed to implement these projects in collaboration with the community.

Have the community in Battagram seen the film, and if so what was their reaction? 

The principal participants have watched different cuts as the film has evolved, and their response has been very enthusiastic.

They were already extremely familiar with the archival material. For weeks during and after the incident, their story was everywhere—across television news, social media, mobile-phone footage and drone images. They had repeatedly seen themselves represented through the news, other people’s social-media accounts and outside reporting.

What was new was seeing how their own participation reshaped that material. In the studio, with their families present and the cable car safely reconstructed only a foot above the floor, the boys walked us through what had happened that night. They showed us where everyone had been sitting, how they had moved and what they remembered moment by moment.

That produced a meaningful shift in their relationship to the story. They were no longer simply the subjects of news coverage or people being spoken about by others. They had helped decide how the experience would be reconstructed, understood and remembered. They had co-authored the film with us.

For me, that is where the power lies. The film does not merely show them surviving a frightening event; it allows them to reclaim the telling of it. They are not passive figures inside somebody else’s narrative. They are active authors of their own story.

Hanging by a Wire plays from Fri 28 Aug.