ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL editor Thea Eymèsz worked with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder on sixteen of his films, beginning with 1969’s GODS OF THE PLAGUE and ending with 1976’s SATAN’S BREW. Nevertheless, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a completely unrelated story to the bloodshed that took place in 1972 as it is told around Ali, a Moroccan guest worker, and Emmi, an older German woman, who fall in love with one another. Ali and Emmi come across each other at a local Arabian bar as Emmi seeks shelter from the rain outside. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 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. R ainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 movie Fear Eats the Soul is as quietly amazing as ever, nationally re-released as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was released in West Germany on March 5, 1974. The origin of Fear Eats the Soul can be traced to two earlier films. Rainer Werner Fassbinder not only directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), but also scripted the film, designed the sets, and produced. fassbinder’s ali: fear eats the soul is all about interior spaces. it’s a chamber story about what happens in the bedroom and in halls when old ladies gossip. (An optional slap could easily be administered between the thanking and the walking.) The Blu-Ray contains the contents of both disks of the 2003 DVD release, which include interviews … The Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by … As well as the perennial relevance of its story, this double dialectic is perhaps requisite to the enduring resonance and success of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The phrase “fear eats the soul” is one that Arabs often use, Ali tells Emmi. It's filmed and set in Germany. The film has been released by the Criterion Collection as a region 1 DVD with English subtitles. In reserving a more discernible alienation for these key points in the narrative, Fassbinder confronts the viewer with a double dialectic. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul revolves around a romance between an elderly widow and an Arab foreign worker. Emmi enters the bar attracted by the strange music coming from inside and once there, she finds that the bar is frequented by Arab people. In Fassbinder’s own The American Soldier (1970), a hotel chambermaid (played by Margarethe von Trotta) recounts the story of Emmi, a Hamburg cleaning woman who met Ali, a Turkish immigrant worker, in a bar, married him, and was later found strangled, the imprint of the letter A from a signet ring on her throat. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a wonderful story with a strong socioeconomic message that can be compared to Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956) and Far From Heaven (2002) by Todd Haynes where an older woman loves a younger man from a different ethnic group. While she is … it’s a tale about paranoia, distrust, and the horrible effect neighbors can have on a happy relationship, when prejudice begins to … Certainly it is eating his soul. In the following interview, conducted in her Munich apartment in … They abruptly decide to marry, appalling everyone around them. Brigitte Mira heads the cast as a lonely German cleaning woman, who enters into an affair with equally lonely--and much, much younger--Moroccan mechanic El Hedi Ben Salem.