I cried in a cinema in New York, which is not something I do, and certainly not in a room full of strangers who had never heard of Battagram.

My family and I were watching an action thriller. That is the correct way to describe Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire, which opened the Sundance Film Festival this year and has been showing across North America since late August. It has the grammar of one. A ticking clock, an impossible height, a rescue that keeps failing. The difference is that every frame of it happened, on August 22, 2023, and most of it was filmed by the people it happened to.

I was in Karachi and I did what the whole country did, which was stop working and watch. I remember the WhatsApp groups going all afternoon. Nobody was saying anything useful. We were just checking that the others were still watching too, the way you do at a hospital.

We are very good at rescue. What would it take for us to be good at building the bridge?

Muna Khan

Two of the three cables on a makeshift cable car in the Himalayan foothills of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had snapped without warning. Eight people were inside, six of them boys on their way to school. The car tipped onto its side and stayed there, roughly 900 feet above a ravine, held by one damaged wire. Local men who knew those wires estimated it had about 10 hours left in it.

It took 14. Think about what 14 hours is. It is a school day and the evening after it. It is a mother making breakfast and then making dinner. It is long enough to stop believing in the helicopters, and then to start again, and then to stop. The boys were in that car through all of it, in the heat, on a slope, not moving, because moving was the one thing that could kill them faster.

You already know they lived. Naqvi knows you know, and he makes the outcome feel impossible anyway.

What he does not do is the thing I braced myself for. There is no voiceover explaining Pakistan to you. No montage of failures, no minister caught in a lie, no sorrowful survey of a country that cannot maintain its infrastructure. Naqvi told an interviewer that too many films from this region are framed through the lens of victimhood, of helplessness, of poverty. He declined to make one.

Instead he films what actually happened, which is that a great many people decided this was their problem. The police. The army, whose helicopters got one boy out before the rescue cord tangled with the cable and had to be cut, before the light went and the flying had to stop. The villagers who understood the mechanics of that wire because their lives depend on understanding it. Men who rigged a zipline in the dark and went out over the ravine on it. A female police officer who says in the film that when people join hands and work together, they manage.

Irfan’s father is the one who broke me. His son was the first, and only, boy the army helicopter took, and he sits there telling you about a conversation the two of them had while the boy was still in the car. When the winch finally lifted him, his father closed his eyes. He kept them closed. He did not open them until somebody told him the boy was in the helicopter.

I was not the only one crying, in a room where every single one of us already knew that all eight of them lived.

And then later, we laughed out loud. Two of the rescuers recall getting into it on camera, the local man who went out over the ravine against every instruction he was given, and the more sophisticated one with the proper equipment and the proper procedure. Eight people hanging by a wire, pitch darkness, and the two men who are going to save them are having a full squabble, complete with abuse, about how. Only here.

That is what my sister and I were crying about, in a cinema upstate, while everyone around me gripped their armrests.

Because we know nothing works. We know the cable was not inspected, that there is no road, that the cable car existed because the state never built the bridge. We know the thing keeping eight children alive was a single wire nobody had checked. And we also know that when it came apart, the people within reach of it improvised something extraordinary out of rope and nerve, and it held.

That is not a heartwarming detail. It is the operating system. Improvization is what we have instead of maintenance. Every Pakistani watching that film is watching a documentary about their own daily arrangements, scaled up and lit dramatically.

Naqvi has said the villagers told him something that stayed with him through two years of filming. If we had not been on the news, they said, nobody would have cared about us. Once we were saved, everyone left and went about their day.

Everyone left. The cameras, the anchors, the helicopters, the ministers who came for the photograph. The cable cars are still running. Children in those valleys crossed that ravine this morning, because there is still no bridge.

So, the film holds two things at once, and that is what makes it good rather than merely thrilling. A community saved eight lives through a courage the state could not have manufactured. And the reason those lives needed saving is that the same state had not shown up all these years. The rescue is real. So is the fact that it was necessary.

The audience around me saw heroism, and they were right. I saw heroism too, and underneath it a bargain we have all quietly accepted, which is that we will keep each other alive and stop expecting anything else.

The film has played at Sundance, across the US and in British cinemas. Naqvi, I understand, is still trying to get it released here.

There is something almost too neat about that. A film about Pakistanis saving themselves, about their competence and their nerve, screening everywhere except in front of the people it is about. The boys from Battagram have been seen on western screens. They have not been seen at home.

We are very good at rescue. What would it take for us to be good at building the bridge?

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi. X: LedeingLady