‘Copilot’ film: Examining the life of a terrorist’s wife raises more questions than answers

For director Anne Zohra Berrached, her film ‘Copilot’ is less about the tragic events of 9/11, and more about the trauma of being forced to watch the person you love turn into a stranger

The main characters in ‘Copilot’ are reimaginings of real people Berrached discovered in her research (Razor Film/Christopher Aoun)

In an era where more and more families and relationships are divided by ideology, our film Copilot portrays a time before the “big bang” of political polarisation: the end of the 1990s. An amour fou, if you will, against the backdrop of a terrible historical event that we all know, which, in its violence and symbolic power, created a long-lasting void and enigma within us all. Twenty years later, 9/11 lives with us.

My screenwriter, Stefanie Misrahi, and I wanted to bring a love story fraught with this political polarisation to the big screen. It’s a film about power and defeat, life and death, a couple that fights and lies to protect their relationship, and hurts and loves one another. A woman becomes embroiled in a tangle of events that changes her entire life… and the rest of the world, at that. Our protagonist is Asli, who at the end of the story has been so irrevocably destroyed that she cannot help but ask herself is she could have acted differently.

Along with producers Roman Paul and Gerhard Meixner, I began the substantive process of gathering materials, shedding light on murderous terrorists and their wives. Two protagonists emerged, partially from the material we had gathered, and partially from our hearts and minds: Asli and her husband, Saeed, a reimagining of the hijacker-pilot Ziad Jarrah on the ill-fated United 93 flight, which was hijacked as part of the 9/11 attacks but crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. Examining the emotional life of the wife of a terrorist cannot be fact-driven – although Copilot is based on heaps of source material, the film isn’t simply the narration of a historical sequence, but rather a distillation of stories and characters we encountered along the way.