[12][6] She produced and edited Noé's short film Carne (1991) and its sequel, the feature-length I Stand Alone (1998), and together they formed the production company Les Cinémas de la Zone in 1991.

[13][9] Noé explained their coming together as business partners: "we discovered that we shared a desire to make films atypical and we decided together to create our own society, Les Cinémas de la Zone, in order to finance our projects.

[9] Hadžihalilović also contributed to the screenplay of Noé's critically divisive Enter the Void (2009), and continued as a producer of Lux Æterna (2019) and Vortex (2021).

The film features child abuse, and ends with Mimi taking sleeping pills in an effort to copy her mother.

The film was inspired by the 1903 novella Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by German playwright Frank Wedekind.

[9] She has commented on the film's similarity or references to Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).

[20] In 2021, Hadžihalilović released her first English-language feature, Earwig, about a girl whose teeth are made of ice, which won Special Jury Prize at San Sebastian Film Festival.