Blu-ray Release Date: Sept. 30, 2014
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem star in Fassbinder's Ali: Fears Eats the Soul.
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (World on a Wire) paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with the 1974 drama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, an update of Sirk’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 the movie Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly uses the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.
Criterion issued a DVD
• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• 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 cinematographer Jürgen 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 national film movement of which Fassbinder was a part
• Scene from Fassbinder’s 1970 film The American Soldier that inspired Ali
• Trailer
• An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara
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Buy or Rent Ali: Fears Eats the Soul
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