Cinema Seminar:
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Inspired by Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a love story that explores and exposes racial tensions simmering under the surface of 1970s German society. Emmi (Brigitte Mira) is a widowed, a 60-year-old window cleaner, who sparks up a friendship and, eventually, a relationship with Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan migrant worker whom she meets in a bar. Their marriage is greeted as a scandal by Emmi’s family and society, and their relationship struggles to weather the prejudice that greets them at every turn.
Ali is one of the best regarded films directed by the prolific Fassbinder, one of the leading lights of the movement called New German Cinema, and exemplifies his interest in turning melodramas built on the model of Sirk’s work into instruments for social critique.
