Ali: Fear Eats the Soul February 20, 2011

Just as Ming Wong works variations on classic movies such as Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, so did the gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder pay his own sort of homage to a Sirk movie. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973), Fassbinder's sharp-edged yet strangely tender version of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, is a tale of a Munich widow who falls in love with a much younger Moroccan immigrant, a socially unacceptable transgression.