Often, when people talk about Tania Head and her outlandish story, they say she would make a great movie character, that hers is the kind of story made for the big screen. But it is actually the subject of a documentary: La superviviente (The Survivor). For years she was seen as a symbol of resistance, one of the most recognizable voices among 9/11 survivors. She claimed to have escaped from the floor where the second plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center and to have lost her fiancé in the attacks. Her account was so compelling that she became president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. But in 2007, a New York Times investigation revealed what very few had suspected: Tania Head did not exist. The woman was actually Alicia Esteve Head, a Barcelona native who had never been inside the Twin Towers.
Filmmaker Kike Maíllo, director of another acclaimed documentary, Oswald. El falsificador (Oswald: The Forger), and screenwriter and playwright Markos Goikolea reconstruct her extraordinary deception in a highly unusual way. La superviviente opens in theaters in Spain on Friday, August 28, and will debut on the Spanish streaming platform Filmin on September 11, where it will be released as a two-part series.
The documentary not only recounts her story but also examines the motives behind the lie and the complex relationship with the society that allowed it to flourish. To demonstrate that documentary filmmaking can be every bit as cinematic as fiction, Maíllo and Goikolea chose to work with actress Hannah Becker, who plays Alicia, while also showing the process of preparation and rehearsal. The decision allowed them to protect the real protagonist’s identity while creating a “hall of mirrors” between Alicia’s imposture in inventing Tania Head and the actress’s in portraying her.
“We felt that the method Alicia used to build Tania’s false story was remarkably similar to the way we construct characters and their fictional identities,” Maíllo explains. “So we preferred to place ourselves somewhere between the deception Alicia herself created and our own act of performing the impostor.”
“In a way, Alicia was not only an actress but also a talented screenwriter, because she wrote the story everyone wanted to hear,” Goikolea adds. “For a big lie to work, what matters even more than the liar’s skill is the audience’s willingness to believe it. And a story about resilience in the aftermath of 9/11 was desperately needed.”
One of the documentary’s central ideas is precisely that: examining the kinds of stories we want to hear as a society, to the point that we become completely credulous. La superviviente also collects previously unseen testimony and archival material and summarizes an international investigation. Interwoven throughout are scenes filmed by Hannah Becker and footage from her rehearsal process, which closely echoes the real group therapy sessions attended by Alicia/Tania and which helped her refine her deception.
“She began by telling her invented story on an internet forum, then set up a writing workshop where she could draw inspiration from the other participants, and she even used that therapy space as a rehearsal room,” the filmmakers explain.
The documentary also highlights similarities between the Alicia Head case and that of Spanish trade unionist Enric Marco Batlle, who was exposed for fabricating claims that he had survived Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His story became the subject of Javier Cercas’s book El impostor (The Impostor). For Maíllo, characters like the art-forger Oswald or Tania Head “are very compelling because they live in moral ambivalence, full of contrasts; they seek to break free from routine and thrive on lies, but they thrive on a lie that many of us would like to live in,” he argues.
In La superviviente, the filmmakers emphasize that Alicia did not seek financial gain but an “emotional” profit: love, affection, belonging and recognition. In fact, the financial security she enjoyed before embarking on the deception was crucial to maintaining it, since she never needed to apply for assistance. She turned down every benefit offered to her as an alleged victim of the attacks, even as she successfully secured such aid for members of her association.
At these moments in the film, she emerges as a strangely heroic figure. “We are absolutely convinced that even if Alicia had not been financially comfortable at the time, she still would not have taken money as the supposed victim of a terrorist attack,” argue the creators of the documentary.
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