Licensor Information
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation
Directed by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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.
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Release Information:
Technical Specifications
Format:
Blu-ray
Disc:
BD-50 (1 Disc)
Total: 1 Disc
Regions:
A (Blu-ray)
Aspect Ratio:
1.37:1
Audio Options:
German PCM Mono 1.0
Resolution:
1080p/24
Subtitles:
English
Supplements
Types of Supplements Included: Introduction, Interview, Short Film, Television Program, Film Excerpt, Theatrical Trailer, Insert
- 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 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 film movement of which Fassbinder was a part
- Scene from Fassbinder’s 1970 film The American Soldier that inspired Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- Trailer
- Insert featuring an essay by Chris Fujiwara
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Film
Picture
Audio
Supplements
Artwork
Release Credits
Producer: Issa Clubb
Artwork: Michael Boland
Release Notes on Restoration
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1. On widescreen televisions, black bars will appear on the left and right of the image to maintain the proper screen format. Supervised by director of photography Jürgen Jürges, this new digital transfer was created in 4K resolution on an ARRISCAN film scanner from the original camera negative at ARRI Film & TV in Munich, where the film was also restored.
The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 17.5mm magnetic track. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD, AudioCube's integrated workstation, and iZotope RX 3.
The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 17.5mm magnetic track. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD, AudioCube's integrated workstation, and iZotope RX 3.

