How Nat Geo filmmakers documented a 5,000-year-old ancient city from above

In our May 2026 issue, National Geographic takes readers inside the wonder and mystery of Pakistan’s ancient city of Mohenjo Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization that built it nearly 5,000 years ago. Even today, the site is relatively unknown outside of South Asia, but at its height between 2600 and 1900 BCE, Mohenjo Daro was the largest city of one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.

As a South Asian American, I’ve always wondered why this civilization’s heritage was not more widely taught in the western world. When I was in sixth grade, we studied the ancient river valley civilizations in school—Sumer in Mesopotamia, and Egypt. But despite there being a chapter about it in my textbook, we skipped over the Harappan civilization in our classroom instruction. I was disappointed. My father had already told me about their achievements—city planning, the first private toilets, sewage systems, their intricate pottery and seals. I remained curious about this part of human history. As an adult, when I visited the National Museum in New Delhi, India, which holds many Harappan artifacts, I was struck at seeing the famous dancing girl figurine at long last. And when I became a journalist, I nurtured the hope of exploring and bringing the story of this civilization to greater global awareness. In 2022, intense flooding hit Pakistan’s Sindh province, home to Mohenjo Daro, and it led to urgent questions—about its conservation status, its vulnerability to extreme weather—and this moment led to the development of a story that would explore these questions and the site’s future possibilities, especially for the study of archaeology. (Read the special feature about Mohenjo Daro here.)

For this assignment, I worked with the acclaimed Pakistani filmmakers Haya Fatima Iqbal and Nadir Siddiqui, Oscar- and Emmy-award-winning documentarians who took on the challenge of chronicling the 4,500-year-old city in video through aerials and from the ground. The stunning visuals captured the site with such detail and perspective that a still frame from one of Nadir’s videos was included in the print magazine as the story’s opener. Haya and Nadir were on assignment with writer Alizeh Kohari and photographer Sarah Caron. Here, Nadir and Haya take us inside the monumental task of documenting the ancient city for National Geographic.

This interview has been condensed for clarity and space. 

This is the first Nat Geo assignment for both of you. What were your thoughts when you took it on? How was it different from your usual process of filmmaking and documentary assignments? 

Haya: This was one of those interesting shoots—when you're producing as a documentary filmmaker, you have to work with a lot of human beings and you have to check what their moods are, what their willingness is to talk to you, to speak to the camera, access, all of those things. Whereas in this assignment, we knew that we will be in a place where we just have to interact with space.  Everyone who used to live there is not there anymore. You really just need to communicate with the place and see what it gives you, essentially what it gives you in terms of the weather, what it gives you in terms of the mist and the fog and the sun, and you just interact with the place.  For me, this was finally an assignment where the place was prime. And in a way it was pacifying almost because you know that you're not dealing with moving parts. The only moving parts are either elemental or environmental, and then it's just you and the texture and the place and what it looks like and what you feel like when you go and enter the place. 

Nadir: For me, this assignment meant a lot. One of my earliest memories as a child is reading through National Geographic with my grandfather, and like the seed of the idea that there's this way of life which is based on curiosity and exploration, like geography, archeology, history, that started very early for me and it’s closely associated with National Geographic Magazine. Twenty-five years later, it turns out, I had become a documentary photographer, a documentary cinematographer.  

Also, the first field trip I ever went on from school was a trip to Mohenjo Daro. It was the year we had studied it in the history books...and it connected this piece of land and this location to something very deep and profound, the shared mystery of ‘where do we come from?’ So when I went as a kid, I was super excited. I remember when everyone got out of the airport and we landed and there was a shuttle that was taking kids to the site, I remember just running, I didn't even walk, I just ran. And I don't know how to explain it, but [with this assignment] the rush of my childhood was happening again. So I felt like everything was coming full circle in my life, because my curiosities were finally being exercised. I've been consuming this stuff and now … it's my turn to document this place. 

Representing the scale of such a wide site—it's over one square mile wide—along with capturing the fine details of the city grid, the homes, the bricks, was one of the biggest challenges going in. In our pre-production conversations we were discussing how critical it was to capture aerial imagery. How did you plan for the drone work? What was your creative approach? 

Nadir: The drone was a perfect fit for this story,  and for archaeological sites generally. I was really excited to fly the drone because it’s a relatively new technology and it's very exciting when you can get a unique view. Previously, in the old days, you'd be in a helicopter to get a shot like that, and you would have to do a lot of prep to get that helicopter shot and it would be a very, very high-budget thing.  

[Before going into the field] I looked at all footage taken of it, even the amateur YouTubers who as regular tourists had gone and flown their drone and older network pieces who had mostly used old 3D stuff, which dates really badly. And I didn’t want to just do what a mapmaker has done or what Google can do. You want to do something that's in between walking, taking a photograph from the ground and looking straight down. So I initially had this sense that there's an opportunity to get an iconic-looking modern drone shot here, and so it was really important for us to try it in all different lights.  

And we knew that in Sindh, in this region, there's a lot of haze. The sky, at least in summer, it turns almost gray or white. We went in the winter, when it makes the light softer. And then we would get up really early in the morning to get our shots so that we could get the angular sun. The shadows are longer and to our advantage more when the sun is low. So that's why the first shot I did was this slow ascent so that I could identify, what's the perfect angle. 

 Sometimes, you're on the ground and the fallen structures are not tall enough to imply a wall, but you see that straight down, it implies a wall. But then there's a place in-between cinematically where both of those things would register to a viewer, and then the site will also look almost like you can imagine what the city's structure is. So I was throughout trying to find that, trying to find the correct angles for the time of day to communicate the three-dimensionality of the base.

What were the highlights of being there? What’s it like to walk around in a city that’s thousands of years old? 

 Nadir:  Normally, I think anytime you go to see any ancient ruins or any ancient site like this, as a tourist, you will spend a day—a day and a night maybe—but we had three days to spend in this site. At the outset, it feels like a bunch of bricks, but you keep walking and over time a picture starts to form. By the third day, it started feeling really different.  After we had absorbed the place and fallen into a rhythm of how to document it, it was starting to, through osmosis … start to come together and you start to see the infinite possibilities of what life here could have been like. You start to see the kids running in the street and the way that families would have been coexisting.  

Haya: I think Mohenjo Daro is unique, because there’s not a lot of people that visit. It’s not like the Pyramids of Giza. So, because it’s not a tourist-heavy place, there’s a lot of silence over there. And I think that silence is really beautiful. It makes you go back and wonder, imagine and reflect that when I’m looking at these high walls... you wonder.  

Nadir: Yes, really big questions! We were busy, we were flying drones, filming video, but on the third day [of the shoot] I remember saying to Haya that really big, philosophical questions are coming to my mind, really overwhelming me.  

Haya: You have to be mindful when walking—the ground was mostly dust, but I think it's more that being there makes you so humble. You have to really be mindful of how you are walking, not in the fear of damaging things necessarily, but just that so many people have lived here and these are your elders, your ancestors.  

Of course, there's this funny incident about us trying to fly the drone from the river to the site, and the river has moved back, changed its direction over some centuries. 

I really laugh when I think about that. I had this vision of getting a shot of the Indus River and the shot moving from the river to the site to represent that it was a river valley civilization. And then Haya messaged me from the field to say, “So… in 5,000 years, the river has changed course and now there's a whole present-day city that lies between Mohenjo Daro and the Indus river, this video shot is going to be like five minutes long.” 

Nadir: [laughs] While I was filming that shot, I was thinking, ‘how are they going to use this, it’s such a long shot.’  

What does it feel like to have the story come out? An unanticipated part of it is that a still image of the video is in the print magazine as well. 

Nadir: Symbolically, it's like one of the proudest things in my life for me because I really look up to National Geographic for the part it played in my childhood and my life—in strangely, without my knowing, making me who I am. And I think I love documentary in a large part because of it. So the opportunity to work on this and being in the magazine, above and beyond, came as a bonus surprise. It’s cool that all of us are now a part of the record-keeping of [this place] in a certain way. 

We also have an exciting update—two of our local language editions made this story their cover story—that is an image by you on the cover. What's your reaction?

Seeing my image with that yellow border around it, it’s something else, it’s amazing. You just made my day, my month, this is going to be one of the highlights of my year.

What are your hopes and takeaways from both this story and assignment? 

Nadir: I hope that there's a proper effort at doing more excavation here. I hope the world becomes interested again, the state of Pakistan cooperates, and that people can come together to dig further into this mystery because there's so much more. The fact that they have writing, but none of [it is] deciphered…there's so many mysteries that will get opened up and solved.   

Haya: I wish the generations after us are able to experience this place with more knowledge. I hope that the tourism that happens in the aftermath of those excavations also stays ethical and is the right balance of how commercialized a space should be and takes into account how to honor the spirit of a place which is just so ancient and glorious and mysterious and full of wonder. If you really start engaging with the sense of mystery, the historical weight of being there really starts to occur to you. It was a real privilege to be there, to witness that it still exists, and therefore it's so important to preserve. 

The access was unprecedented. And then when you're sitting there under the clear sky—and I mean, that is what happened to me, I think it was a particularly heavy time in my life as well, because I was going through some personal grief. It was just two months after a loved one had passed away, and you are just sitting there, while the timelapse is getting recorded, and you are just like, well, these are the stars, these are my ancestors, these folks are related to each other. And then there's us just sitting using modern-day gadgets to tell a modern-day story about an old city. So I think for me, it's also spiritual as well, that it’s like your elders and your ancestors. And in this world where we talk about decolonizing and looking at indigenous wisdom, the smallness also of feeling that you still don't know so much. It’s particularly humbling and spiritually elevating.