For most sane and normal folks, the events of September 11 sparked not only shock and grief, but also an instinct of outreach — a desire to help, somehow, not only tangibly or materially, but also emotionally. The stories told by some of the survivors in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers were so heartrending that an impulse to share or ease their burden was a fairly natural reaction. Tania Head, however, took that feeling to an extrapolated extreme that’s still rather hard to grasp.

Head (above right) told a devastating story of narrowly escaping death from the 78th floor of the South Tower, blown back against a marble wall by the impact of the airplane, badly burned and suffering from a deep gash that almost took off her entire right arm. She was saved by Welles Crowther, a young man wearing a red bandanna whose heroic actions on that day were widely reported. Her common-law husband, Dave, however, was not so lucky — he perished in the North Tower. She spent two months in the hospital, and later co-founded the influential World Trade Center Survivors Network advocacy group. The only problem? Her entire story was a fabrication. On September 11, Head, actually born Alicia Esteve, was in post-graduate classes in Barcelona.

The documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There, from executive producer Meredith Vieira, chronicles this bizarre, stranger-than-fiction story, interviewing around a half dozen of the chief subject’s former friends and peers in the aforementioned group. It’s even more peculiar when one considers that the director, Angelo Guglielmo, Jr., was actually pressed into making a nonfiction movie about 9/11 survivors by Head herself, before the truth about her deceit came out in a series of investigative articles published in the New York Times in the fall of 2007. That means Head is very much featured in the unintended resultant product that is The Woman Who Wasn’t There, narrating her (false) story while others recount their deep connection to her, creeping suspicion about her story, and eventual betrayal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ID Films, unrated, 65 minutes)