My Name is not Ali
جنة علي

Documentary, Director: Viola Shafik, Egypt/Germany 2011, 98 min, AR/DE, with EN st. 

> Friday 25.4.2025 | 19:00
Wolf Kino | Tickets

Followed by a film talk with Viola Schafik.

His anti-racist film Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974) gained German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder international acclaim. The protagonist, an Arab foreign worker, was played by Moroccan non-professional actor El Hedi Ben Salem M’barek Mohammed Mustafa, Fassbinder’s lover at the time. While the film itself courageously deals with the racism of post-war German society, its makers reproduced the insensibility and invention of the Other, fantasizing their own ‘Ben Salem’. Collage-like, through interviews and archive material, My Name Is Not Ali uncovers the invention of El Hedi Ben Salem by the Fassbinder troupe, an image not revised by most of its members till today (text: mec films). With this film, Viola Shafik has dared to center the marginalized stories of migrant artists in Germany and expose the persistence of racist and orientalist legacies even within the German leftist film scene.