​​​​Asli and Saeed’s meeting in the mid-1990s was not a coincidence. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city is gripped by a sense of euphoria as people are once again able to move freely. Turkish Asli is studying medicine and Lebanese Saeed is studying dentistry, but jokes that Germans don’t need dentists as no one really smiles here anyway. Going against the protestations of Saeed’s secular family and Asli’s relatives, the two infatuated students  promise one another eternal devotion in a mosque in Hamburg – come what may. Soon, however, Saeed returns to his dream of becoming a pilot. As his fundamentalist ideas and his dislike of Western values grow, Asli’s husband gradually becomes a stranger to her.

The director of Copilot is award-winning German director Anne Zohra Berrached who at the film’s premiere described it as a study of the psychology of the wives of killers, terrorists and radicals. Structured as a pastel-tinted melodrama, the film takes on increasingly cooler tones as an intertwined tragedy set in multicultural Germany unfolds. Simultaneously tackling themes of lost identity and the roots of terrorism, the film takes us into the psyche of Ziad Jarrah, one of the perpetrators of the 11 September terrorist attacks in 2001. Jarrah was a pilot who hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 and a member of Al-Qaeda. Saeed is Ziad personified on screen.