Timelines

A chance encounter between Emmi and the young Moroccan Ali in a bar in Munich develops into a romantic relationship. Shortly after he moves in with her, they decide to get married. Emmi's children, neighbors, and coworkers are outraged and express their contempt in various ways. In "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul", Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a couple whose age difference is met with great rejection in their social environment. The director based his film on the story of Douglas Sirk's 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. It tells the story of a rich widow and a gardener who face a lot of resistance from their community because of their big age difference and social status. The film also addresses the issue of migrant workers, who were part of public and social life in the Federal Republic of Germany at the time the film was made. The year after the release of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul", Helma Sanders-Brahms presented her film Shirin's Wedding. Both films are among the few works by German directors that address the lives and associated traditional and cultural conventions of migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany. Shirin's Wedding is about the protagonist of the same name, who is promised to the landowner of her village but is actually in love with Mahmut, who is struggling to make ends meet as a worker in Germany. To escape marriage to the landowner, she herself goes to Germany as a worker to find Mahmut. Her suffering and cultural background are central themes of the film. These two significant films tie in with the emergence of “guest worker cinema” in the 1960s (see “Gastarbeiterkino,” 1968) and pave the way for migrant cinema in the early 1980s (see Migrantisches Kino, 1980).