Travelling between Germany, France and Tunisia, Viola Shafik reconstructs and deconstructs the unknown life story of El Hedi Ben Salem through interviews with his companions and family members as well as archive material. With openness and slight naivety the interviewees explain how “Ali” became an oriental object of projection for the Fassbinder group, while El Hedi Ben Salem, the human being, was overlooked in order to establish the foreigner as “other.” A no-frills examination of a piece of German and Munich film history.
Mixing scenes of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, François Ozon creates a new film about cinephilic contamination.
El Hedi ben Salem was a Moroccan actor. He is best known as the lover and collaborator of provocative German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He died while in prison. Fassbinder dedicated his last film, Querelle (1982), to Salem. In 2012, a documentary on Salem's life entitled My Name Is Not Ali, premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival.
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