CANNES: The film, “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep,” unfolds within the fog-covered vastness of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border, where the disappearance of a young woman named Gamra quietly unsettles a Bedouin community governed by inherited tribal codes.
As her cousin Yasser searches for her across roads swallowed by mist, an accidental car collision gradually exposes the invisible logic organizing the world surrounding them, where justice comes through communal negotiations capable of reshaping entire lives overnight.
What is remarkable about Rakan Mayasi’s film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was supported by Red Sea Film Fund and the Doha Film Institute, is the way it resists transforming this material into conventional social drama.
Another filmmaker might have approached the story through escalating confrontation, but Mayasi instead builds the film through fragmentation and the slow accumulation of unease.
Scenes seem to begin too early or end too late, as the film is less interested in dramatic progression than in observing how tension quietly settles into spaces.
After Yasser accidentally hits a man with his car while searching for Gamra, the consequences spread silently across the community. Decisions begin circulating between men gathered in enclosed rooms, while elsewhere women wait for futures increasingly negotiated beyond their control.
One woman suddenly becomes part of a reconciliation agreement between families as her future transforms into an unspoken settlement preventing further bloodshed, something embodied through the film’s two central sisters, Rim and Jawaher.
What gives the film its force, however, is Mayasi’s refusal to over-dramatize these realities. Violence rarely pops up directly within the frame; instead, it exists within the terrifying calmness through which irreversible decisions become ordinary.
Together with cinematographer Pol Seif, Mayasi films the Bekaa Valley with extraordinary patience. The more still the image becomes, the more the surrounding world begins to breathe through it, as we can see fog swallowing roads and distant mountains metaphorically overpowering human movement.
There are traces of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in the director trusting non-professional actors, and the emotional ambiguity of everyday life in a closed community.
However, “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” imitates that cinematic lineage and converses with it. Mayasi understands that realism in cinema is not produced by naturalism alone but by allowing uncertainty to remain visible inside the frame and resisting the temptation to over-explain the world.
