Breaking New Ground: Palestinian Filmmaker Rakan Mayasi on His Cannes Hit ‘Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep’

The cinematic landscape often relies on familiar formulas, returning repeatedly to well-trodden historical trauma and societal conflict. Yet, iconoclastic Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi has chosen a vastly different path for his debut feature, “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep.” The film made a powerful splash during its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, offering audiences a poetic, visually striking treatment of a Bedouin community tucked away in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley—a marginalized group rarely captured with such depth on the silver screen. Following its celebrated launch in France, the film has traveled extensively through the international festival circuit and is currently screening in a competitive slot at the prestigious El Gouna Film Festival, where Variety caught up with the director to discuss his vision, his methods, and his upcoming projects.

Inspired heavily by memories of Mayasi’s own grandmother, “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” unfolds as a harrowing and intimate tale of two women who suddenly find themselves caught in the gears of a traditional tribal blood feud. The film’s visionary style bears the intellectual and artistic fingerprints of Mayasi’s mentor, the legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, yet it firmly maintains its own distinct rhythm. It offers a sensorial, at times feverish point of view that immerses the viewer entirely in the psychological landscape of its characters.

International sales for the feature are being handled by Salaud Morisset. Following its warm reception in Cannes and at El Gouna, the film has sustained a remarkable momentum across the globe. It is scheduled to screen at Montpellier’s CineMed, followed immediately by a prominent appearance at the Rome Film Festival within their Best First Feature section.

Crafting Visual Metaphors and Unforgettable Set Pieces

“Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” is punctuated by several exceptional set pieces that have quickly become talking points among critics and cinephiles alike. The narrative opens dramatically with a car engulfed in flames, shifts midway into a stunningly hallucinatory wedding sequence, and culminates in an evocative longshot that deliberately challenges and plays with visual space.

When discussing the conceptualization of these powerful moments alongside his cinematographer, Pål Seif, Mayasi reveals that while some elements were meticulously planned from the outset, others evolved organically during production. The striking opening fire, for instance, was foundational to the project from day one. Deeply interested in metaphors and the ways abstract ideas can be translated visually, Mayasi and Seif deliberately engineered the opening sequence to create a visceral sensation for the audience. By employing a tight zoom, they aimed to make viewers feel as though the burning car was hurtling closer and closer while the flames relentlessly spread.

In contrast, the film’s striking conclusion was entirely rewritten just three days before principal photography wrapped. Recognizing the scene required a profound visual punch, Mayasi and Seif re-blocked and completely overhauled the ending on the fly to maximize its emotional and spatial resonance.

Subverting Narrative Flow Through an Improvised Wedding Sequence

Perhaps no single moment in the film has garnered as much critical attention for its sheer beauty and emotional whiplash as the wedding sequence. In this segment, Mayasi consciously steps outside the strict confines of conventional narrative storytelling to alter the film’s rhythm and experiment with a psychedelic approach.

The sequence deliberately blurs the line of reality; it is never explicitly stated whether the festivities represent an actual wedding celebration. When one of the sisters, Jawahir, is ultimately revealed as a bride, the presentation is deeply theatrical. Mayasi intended for the sequence to function as a direct zoom into the character’s subconscious—an exploration of her internal imagination and her idealized vision of a celebration.

This creative freedom extended to the logistics of the shoot itself. The entire wedding sequence was entirely improvised, utilizing non-professional actors and community members that the director had never previously met. The production put out a wide call encouraging as many local residents as possible to join the shoot. Fortunately, a large and energetic crowd showed up, leaving Mayasi with the simple task of wielding a microphone to whip the crowd into an even greater frenzy.

This stylistic choice serves a deeper thematic purpose, allowing the community to be portrayed with multi-dimensional humanity rather than flat victimization. By juxtaposing two entirely contrasting emotional states, Mayasi deliberately seeks to provoke a complex reaction from his audience. He wants viewers to experience the visceral pleasure of watching a beautifully shot, psychedelically charged dance sequence, only to experience a sudden jolt of cognitive dissonance afterward—wondering why they enjoyed such a visually intoxicating scene given the heavy context surrounding the characters. It is an aesthetic of discomfort and cinematic provocation that Mayasi embraces wholeheartedly, noting with a laugh that his next film will lean even further into that exact disorientation.

Rejecting Formulas and Elevating Unseen Communities

The bold choice to set a feature within the Bekaa Valley focusing on a Bedouin community highlights Mayasi’s distinct philosophy regarding Middle Eastern cinema. He is openly critical of formulaic storytelling that panders to external expectations, particularly the persistent industry demand for Lebanese cinema to revolve primarily around the Civil War or subsequent national crises.

Refusing to subscribe to these narrative expectations, Mayasi prefers to investigate communities that have historically been overlooked by feature films, finding vastly superior narrative depth, character complexity, and raw humanity in those spaces. This commitment to authenticity is precisely why he opted to cast non-professional actors rather than dropping trained professionals into an unfamiliar cultural context.

Though of Palestinian heritage, Mayasi has spent two decades living in Lebanon, a country where he shaped his identity as a filmmaker. While he does not hold Lebanese nationality, his professional roots anchor him deeply to the region, even as he remains firmly outside the commercial mainstream, constantly striving to dig deeper into the lived realities of ordinary people.

Looking Ahead: From Dark Comedy in Gaza to an Extensive Festival Tour

As “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” continues its remarkable run, Mayasi is already looking toward his next creative endeavors. His upcoming project marks a sharp tonal departure from his debut feature. Titled “The Passport,” the film is an absurdist, deadpan dark comedy that explores life, death, and bureaucratic absurdity within a much more controlled, highly staged environment.

Half of the narrative is set to take place in Gaza. Initially conceived as Mayasi’s intended feature debut, the project was put on hold following the outbreak of the war in Palestine. Now, the director is slowly returning to development and early pre-production on the film, which is being produced by May Odeh, who previously served as an associate producer on “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep.”

In the meantime, the momentum for his debut feature shows no signs of slowing down. Following its initial splash in Cannes, the film has been selected by roughly 50 international film festivals. Mayasi is currently embarking on a rigorous October festival tour spanning eight different events. His itinerary includes screenings at the Rome Film Festival, the Viennale, the Valladolid International Film Festival, and Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Reprise program in Bucharest, followed by an upcoming screening in Geneva in early November.