Harpur Cinema Presents: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 93 min.

Friday, February 16, 2024, and Sunday, February 18, 2024: Lecture Hall 6, 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:00 pm. $4 Single Admission.

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.