The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmakerās 1955Ā All That Heaven Allows.Ā 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 surpriseāand to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. InĀ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,Ā 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 JuĢrgen JuĢrges, 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 EymĆØsz
- Shahbaz Noshirās 2002 shortĀ Angst isst Seele auf,Ā which reunites Mira, EymeĢsz, and JuĢrges 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 Fassbinderās screenplay
- Signs of Vigorous Life: New German Cinema,Ā a 1976 BBC program about the film movement of which Fassbinder was a part
- Scene from Fassbinderās 1970 filmĀ The American SoldierĀ that inspiredĀ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara
New cover by Michael Boland
