Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (35mm)

(Angst essen Seele auf, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany 1974, 93 min., 35mm, German and Arabic with English subtitles)

One night, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), an aging cleaning woman, wanders into an unfamiliar bar during a downpour. She ends up dancing with a young Moroccan guest worker named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Soon they are close friends, then lovers, then they decide to be married, despite their near 20 year age difference. For Emmi’s family and co-workers, the marriage is a complete disgrace, for Ali’s friends, it's bewildering. The prejudices of race, age, and class the two confront in the face of their marriage only proves to strengthen their relationship. It’s when they rejoin their respective social worlds that conflict and heartbreak arises. To say Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, in which an older woman falls for her younger gardener to her children and her friends’ disgust, is to simplify the unique power of both films. While delicate in its treatment of tenderness and love, Fassbinder places the story in the brutal world of the city, where the characters cannot escape their confined surroundings, and violence boils just under the surface.