Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Featuring an introduction from film critic and author of the new book Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers, Gerald Peary. Copies of the book will be available for sale in the Coolidge lobby.
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. - The Criterion Collection
