Catalan Alicia Esteve spent six years posing as Tania Head, a 9/11 survivor and head of a victims' association. In a new documentary "The Survivor", Kike Maíllo investigates how the lie endured until she was exposed by The New York Times in 2007.
Tania Head was, according to her own account, one of 18 people who survived on the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the area located above the point where the second plane struck on 11 September 2001.
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She said that a dying man handed her his wedding ring so she could return it to his widow, that a volunteer with his clothes on fire helped her down the stairs, and that she lost her fiancé, David, in the North Tower. On the strength of that story, shewent on to chair the World Trade Center Survivors' Associationand to meet Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York.
None of that was true. Tania Head was in fact Alicia Esteve, a young woman from Barcelona who, on the day of the attacks, was doing a master's degree in the city and had never set foot in the Twin Towers.
Nor did the engagement to David Scott Suárez, the Deloitte employee killed in the attack to whom she claimed to have been engaged, ever exist. Neither his family, nor the company he supposedly worked for, ever confirm that link.
The lie held until 2007, when New York Times journalists David W. Dunlap and Serge F. Kovaleski, following an intuition that something in her story did not add up, exposed it. Shortly afterwards, word began to circulate in survivors' forums that Alicia Esteve had committed suicide, a claim that has never been confirmed.
Kike Maíllo's documentary: The Survivor
No fewer than 25 years after the attacks, Barcelona-born director Kike Maíllo, known for Eva and Toro, delves into this story with The Survivor, a documentary that continues the line opened with Oswald. El falsificador, his previous work on art forger Oswald Aulestia.
As Alicia Esteve has refused to take part or show her face, Maíllo turns to actor and comedian Hannah Becker to reconstruct, using direct sources such as writings and therapy recordings, what was never filmed or answered in a real interview.
For the documentary, Maíllo travels to the United States and interviews those who knew Tania Head well: survivors from the association, the former president she ousted, and Sam Kedem, the psychologist who treated her as a victim of the attack without ever detecting any inconsistency in her account. Opinions of her are far from unanimous.
Some remember her as a woman hungry for the limelight; others argue that without her dedication the association would not have achieved even half the impact or the goals it did, and stress that she never made any money out of the fraud.
It is an 88-minute documentary portraying the Catalan woman who for years took advantage of passing herself off as just another victim.
Why did nobody uncover her sooner?
What the documentary sets out to do, more than track down the current whereabouts of Alicia Esteve, is to understand how she was able to sustain for six years**,** without arousing suspicion, a completely invented identity and trauma.
The case has parallels with that of Enric Marco, the Catalan who pretended to be a survivor of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and even went on to chair the Amical de Mauthausen before being unmasked (source in Spanish). In both cases, a narrative built out of emotive detail connected with the public in a way that the more sober real testimonies did not manage.
The question the documentary leaves hanging is not only how Alicia Esteve managed to fool so many people, but what collective need allowed that lie to work for so long without anyone, not even a psychologist, questioning her story.
The Survivor is available to watch from 11 September on Spanish streaming platform Filmin.
