21/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: In his debut feature film, Rakan Mayasi presents a visually stunning tale with tragic undertones, following the journeys of women striving to defy their fate

The imagery echoes the poetry and mystery of the title. Rakan Mayasi’s Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Although this is his first feature film, the Palestinian filmmaker — born in Germany and based in Brussels, trained in South Korea under Abbas Kiarostami, then with Béla Tarr in Bucharest, and a graduate of the LUCA School of Arts in Belgium — already has a solid filmography to his name, with his short films having been screened around the world.

In the Bekaa Valley, a young woman has gone missing. She is the talk of the town. In the course of a conversation, we learn that she was in love with a married man and that she is suspected of having set fire to a car. What if she had left because she was guilty of that, and perhaps even more so, of being a woman who has desires? When her cousin accidentally runs over a man from a rival clan, the situation spirals out of control. The law of retaliation is invoked: a life for a life. Except that whilst the cousin is forced into exile, it is the lives of his sisters that are put on the line. So Rim and Jawaher are smuggled out of their community, sent to the offended tribe to be offered in exchange; they're collateral and sacrificial victims of an accident disguised as a crime. One of the two will be married off, as for the other…

Rakan Mayasi describes Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep as a non-fictional fiction, and indeed, the roles were played by non-professional actors and actresses living in the region, with the main protagonists even living in the house featured in the film. The film was shot in Lebanon during the ceasefire, with a sense of urgency that is palpable in the film’s themes and the conflicts underpinning the narrative (the war in Syria to which the men go and from which they return, the refugee camps where the missing woman is sought, the geopolitics of the region infusing the narrative arc). Yet the film’s form seeks out and cherishes moments of pause, focusing on everyday gestures and the vastness of the landscapes, the impassive backdrop to these modern tragedies. We listen in the shadows, alongside the women. We hear the wind and Rim’s breath. We take the time with her to say goodbye to the children before she is offered up as a sacrifice, and with her father to wall up the house abandoned in exile.

Rakan Mayasi composes his shots like paintings, multiplying frames within frames, depicting boundaries and obstacles, right up to the final scene. Throughout the tale of these shattered lives, a few sequences suspend time through the beauty of a landscape passing by a car window, or a young woman standing before a window who, as she sits down, reveals her sister outside, in her wedding dress, so close and yet already far from her.

Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep was produced by Atata (Belgium) - for whom this is their first feature - and co-produced by TCPC, Lux Motus Tempus, Mayana Films and Naoko Films, with the support of the Palestine Film Fund, Doha Film Institute and the Red Sea Fund, amongst others. The Paris and Berlin-based company Salaud Morisset handles international sales.

(Translated from French)