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Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker-pilot on the United 93 flight, is reinvented as a considerate husband in Anne Zohra Berrached’s film

Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title. It presents us with a romantically imagined fictional couple inspired by Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese-born 9/11 hijacker-pilot on the United 93 flight and his one-time German-Turkish girlfriend Aysel Şengün, whom he had met while a student drawn into al-Qaida’s notorious Hamburg Cell. Jarrah is often regarded as different from the other hijackers in that he came from a wealthy family, was not averse to the western world of pleasure, and was even rumoured to have had (temporary) qualms about the mission itself. Jarrah was dramatised as a rich-kid jihadi convert in Antonia Bird’s TV drama The Hamburg Cell in 2004, and made an appearance in...

The Match Factory is taking a strong slate to the European Film Market, including two world premieres: Anne Zohra Berrached’s “Copilot,” which is in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section, and Christian Schwochow’s “Je Suis Karl,” which is in Berlinale Special. Also in the festival program is Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo,” the critically acclaimed adult animation awarded at Sundance, which is in the Generation lineup.

Berrached, whose “24 Weeks” played in Berlinale Competition in 2016, is back at the festival with “Copilot,” a bold feature set in the mid 90s, an era of optimism, when the conflicts of the old-world order seemed to dissolve, and long-lasting peace seemed achievable. Asli (Canan Kir) meets Saeed (Roger Azar), whose love at first changes her life, before shaking the world to the core.

The producers are Germany’s Razor Film, France’s Haut et Court and Germany’s Zero Films. Neue Visionen...