Ali – Fear Eats the Soul

NOTE: This is a region-1 DVD which requires a region free DVD-player.

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