Ali (1974)

Winner of the International Critics Prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is one of acclaimed German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most straightforward and universal triumphs. In a story that is powerfully life affirming without being very heartwarming, Emmi is a sixty-year-old German cleaning woman who as a prank is set up by a slatternly barmaid with forty-year-old Ali, a recent Moroccan immigrant. Emmi and Ali overcome their initial suspicion and awkwardness to fall in love and marry, scandalizing Emmi’s children and igniting the subsurface racial animosity in the ethnically pure Germans they must deal with every day.