Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) is a West German drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. On a rainy evening in Munich, Emmi Kurowski — a cleaning woman in her sixties — ducks into a bar full of Moroccan immigrant workers. She ends up dancing with Ali, a mechanic roughly thirty years her junior. The friendship becomes a marriage.

Then the people around them start reacting. Emmi's adult children stop speaking to her. Her neighbors make their disapproval plain. Her coworkers treat her like she no longer exists. Fassbinder shot the entire film in fourteen days, consciously reworking Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows — and he used the melodrama structure not for sentiment, but to show exactly how social pressure organizes itself. Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem play two people who just want to be left alone, which turns out to be an unreasonable demand.

Fassbinder was 29 when he made this. The precision is startling. Stream Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) online on iFILM.