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

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

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........

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