Rakan Mayasi's Debut Lights Up 50 Festivals After Cannes

Rakan Mayasi's debut feature "Yesterday the Eye Didn't Sleep" has been selected for 50 festivals since its Cannes premiere, and this week it competes at the El Gouna Film Festival. The Palestinian filmmaker spoke to Variety about the film's path and what comes next.

The feature premiered in this year's Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes. It tells the story of two women who become pawns in a tribal blood feud, set in a Bedouin community in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, and it draws on Mayasi's mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, while keeping its own feverish point of view. Inspired by Mayasi's grandmother, the film was warmly received after Cannes and will screen at Montpellier's CineMed, followed immediately by the Rome Film Festival's Best First Feature section. Salaud Morisset handles international sales.

How were the film's set pieces built?

The film opens with a burning car, builds to a hallucinatory wedding sequence, and closes on an evocative longshot. Mayasi says the fire was planned from the start. "For sure the fire, it was there since the beginning," he told Variety. With cinematographer Pôl Seif, he devised a slow zoom so "the fire is spreading" toward the viewer — his way of translating a metaphor into images. The ending, by contrast, was blocked again and rewritten entirely just three days before the shoot wrapped.

The wedding scene works differently. Mayasi stepped outside the narrative to change the rhythm with what he calls a psychedelic approach. The sister Jawahir's reveal as a bride is deliberately theatrical — "kind of like zooming into her subconscious," he says. The whole scene was improvised. Mayasi had never met the dancers before; his team put out a call for participants, and his only job on set was "to just have a microphone and make them more energetic."

The scene carries a deliberate trap for the audience. Mayasi wanted viewers to enjoy the dance, then feel uneasy about that pleasure — to ask themselves, in his words, "what the fuck did I just watch and why did I enjoy that?" He confirms the next film will work entirely this way.

Why a Bedouin story instead of the Civil War?

Mayasi rejects the formula he sees in Lebanese cinema's recurring focus on the Civil War and its aftermath. "I want to go to communities that have not been on film before, mainly because there's much more depth in plots and characters and life there," he said. That choice led him to cast non-professional actors, because "this fragile authenticity has to be kept."

His own position shapes the work. Mayasi is Palestinian, lived in Lebanon for 20 years without Lebanese nationality, and became a filmmaker there — feeling, as he puts it, somehow both Palestinian and Lebanese.

What does this change for his career?

The next film is already defined. "The Passport," a dark comedy half set in Gaza, was meant to be Mayasi's first feature; he stopped it when the war began and is now returning to it slowly. He describes it as an absurdist, deadpan piece about life, death and "the bureaucracy of life," staged in a more controlled environment. It sits in late development or early pre-production, with May Odeh — associate producer on "Yesterday the Eye Didn't Sleep" — producing.

Meanwhile, the debut keeps traveling. Mayasi tours eight festivals in October, including Rome, the Viennale, Valladolid and Bucharest's Cristian Mungiu-curated Cannes Reprise, with Geneva in early November. With sales active and a second feature assembling, the Bekaa Valley story looks set to keep opening doors for its director.