Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (DVD)
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow (Brigitte Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly wields the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Jürgen Jürges, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Introduction from 2003 by filmmaker Todd Haynes
- Interviews from 2003 with actor Brigitte Mira and editor Thea Eymèsz
- Shahbaz Noshir’s 2002 short Angst isst Seele auf, which reunites Mira, Eymèsz, and Jürges to tell the story, based on real events, of an attack by neo-Nazis on a foreign actor while on his way to a stage performance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s screenplay
- Signs of Vigorous Life: New German Cinema, a 1976 BBC program about the film movement of which Fassbinder was a part
- Scene from Fassbinder’s 1970 film The American Soldier that inspired Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara
- New cover by Michael Boland