Sydney Film Festival: Hanging by a Wire (dir. Mohammed Naqvi)
It can always throw me a little to see a major studio’s ident at the start of a festival film. Especially a documentary. And especially the Universal logo, with its bravura fanfare and grand scale vision of a twirling globe. It made much more sense rather quickly with Mohammed Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire, a documentary that nevertheless moves with the sort of absurd Hollywood maximalist propulsion that Michael Bay once specialised in. A bombastic journey into the hills of Pakistan told with the sort of strained urgency of a Netflix true time doc that plays more like a trial run for an inevitable dramatic feature than anything resembling a work of investigative non-fiction filmmaking.
On August 22, 2023, a cable-car carrying eight teenage students to school over a vast expanse in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, was left precariously dangling after a cable snapped. Unlike the Thai cave incident, to which this shares so many story beats with you’d swear it was scripted, people were actually aware of this one pretty quickly. It was right there, literally hovering in front of them and caught on the omnipresent camera from everybody who came to either mountain ridge to watch in shock as these boys all hung potentially just one small move away from plummeting to their deaths. Those very amateur phone videos, plus that of a local drone operator who was able to get up close and personal with the terrified boys, allowed the story to make television news quickly—at first regionally specific and then very quickly it was global. Police sprung into action, such as it was, and a variety of rescue options were pursued to varying levels of success.
A compelling story, but one which is ultimately treated rather glibly by a production that shares too much in common with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s The Rescue—including a frustrating reliance on recreations and an unfortunate lack of suspense. I mean, this would have all been in such awfully bad taste had even just one of the boys not made it out alive. So, I was never really in any sort of suspense as to the ultimate fate of the story. But asking many of its most prominent figures to play out even the most mundane of tasks is a real drag. Especially knowing it comes at the expense of some real worthwhile narratives.
Naqvi’s storytelling choices here are damning. When interview subjects like the boys’ fathers aren’t being directed to speak to the camera in ways to keep up the suspense over its fast-paced 77-minute runtime, they are obfuscating with an invested interest in not saying anything too critical. Numerous threads with real knotty potential come and go, swiftly ignored out of a presumed desire to not rock too many boats (or cable cars, I guess) politically. Police ineptitude and government neglect (the cable car remains hanging by that damned wire to this day!) are just two of the very obvious strands that get discarded any time they trouble the narrative. The way in which a big-muscled influencer and narcissist (if you can believe it!!) with a military complex and daddy issues is somehow hired to assist in the rescue and uses the event as a marketing opportunity, is another. Class hovers over the entire film like the very helicopters attempting to save the boys, but it too is barely touched upon in any meaningful way.
One of the story’s subjects is Sahib Khan, a sort of DIY cable expert (or “sky pirate”) who lives in poverty but makes it to the end of Hanging by a Wire as the truest hero. He points to a far more interesting, socio-politically complex take on the story that goes begging. Likewise, Sumaira Khan, the first news reporter on the scene, has perhaps a different angle altogether on the story, but isn’t allowed to really go anywhere with it. Maybe if this were to be adapted into a feature film, they and the themes their appearances at the scene represents might get more attention. Maybe it would fall into the same traps as the documentary. Who’s to say. Hopefully they’d at least have a better score to soundtrack them. Given so few people went to go see Ron Howard's take on the Thai cave incident with its big Hollywood stars (my review of Thirteen Lives is available at ScreenHub), I doubt they'll give this story the same benefit.
I rarely find myself coming out the other side of a documentary feeling quite so negatively. Even if I do not respond to a filmmaker’s style, it’s rarely as stridently enacted as it is here. Perhaps I am being unkind of suggest Mohammed Naqvi was politically compromised in his making of Hanging by a Wire, but it’s the only real excuse I have for the dereliction of duty that I feel he does to this incredible story and those who have been left scarred (mentally and/or physically) by the litany of red flags it raises. That the filmmaking is so nauseously overbearing to boot makes this an unfortunate collision between empty and excess that I didn’t enjoy.
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