La superviviente documentary explores 9/11 survivor hoax

The new documentary ‘La superviviente’ (The Survivor), directed by Kike Maíllo, explores the extraordinary deception of Alicia Esteve Head, a woman from Barcelona who posed as a 9/11 survivor for years.

Under the pseudonym Tania Head, she claimed to have escaped from the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and asserted that she lost her fiancé in the attacks. Her narrative was so convincing that she rose to become the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. However, a 2007 investigation by the New York Times revealed that Head had never been inside the Twin Towers.

To reconstruct the story, Maíllo and screenwriter Markos Goikolea utilized actress Hannah Becker to portray Alicia. This approach aims to create a “hall of mirrors” by mirroring the protagonist’s method of constructing a false identity with the actress’s portrayal of that identity. The film examines the motivations behind the lie and how the deception was able to flourish within society.