Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Emmi Kurowski, a cleaning woman widowed for years, spends her evenings alone. Her grown children rarely visit. One night she walks into a bar where immigrant workers gather and meets Ali, a Moroccan mechanic many years her junior. They talk, they dance, and he comes home with her. Before long they marry, and the marriage turns into a public scandal: her children are ashamed, the neighbors talk, and she is shunned at the shop where she buys her groceries. The couple holds together, yet once the hostility from outside begins to fade, the doubts they carry about each other come to the surface.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed, wrote and produced the film, which appeared in 1974, between The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Chinese Roulette. Brigitte Mira plays Emmi and El Hedi ben Salem plays Ali, with Irm Hermann, Barbara Valentin, Elma Karlowa and Anita Bucher in supporting roles. It runs 93 minutes.

Reception has been strong across the board. On IMDb it holds 8 out of 10 from around 26,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.7 out of 10 from roughly 467 votes. A critics' rating of 9.3 out of 10 from 41 reviews places professional assessment noticeably above the broader audience scores.