Palestinian director Rakan Mayasi’s feature debut, Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, was screened at the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Drawing from his own family history, Mayasi’s film explores the diktats of an unrepenting patriarchy that pervades the Bedouin community in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley.

Few cameras have ventured into this fertile valley of ethereal beauty, whose ecological fragility and people face regular Israeli aggression (it is a Hezbollah stronghold); bombs continue to rain down on Lebanon as of this writing, despite a ceasefire. Mayasi, born in Germany to Palestinian parents and now based between Brussels and Beirut, is vocal about his Palestinian identity in his work, but here the film looks inward, drawing on the life of his own grandmother, who was married off at 14.

As a male Palestinian director living in Europe, introspecting on the thorny yet quotidian misogyny and patriarchal fervour that dictate life in a remote valley, Mayasi faces multiple conundrums. Not least is the balancing act of confronting his own prejudices, which arise from crisscrossing identities, while dispassionately delivering a tale from a region whose people have largely been seen through the lens of war and geopolitical crisis.

But the film itself is not overtly troubled by its intent, for it plunges headfirst into its themes with the incisive eye of a social-realist filmmaker. In doing so, it refuses to a great extent to comport itself to the orientalist framework and glossed-over themes that European film festivals have come to expect from global cinema.

A decade of shorts

In a career spanning more than a decade and punctuated by several short films strongly rooted in his Palestinian identity, Mayasi’s work swings between the subversive and the melancholic, all of it laced with themes of alienation, exile, the right to return, arranged marriages, and the subjugation of the Palestinian people in their own land.

He began with the short film Sea Sonata in 2010. Roubama followed in 2012, inspired by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish; it is set in the festering ruins of a landfill where its protagonist, Kareem, lives in a metal shed and contemplates his life as a refugee waiting for better shores.

The 2017 short Bonboné explored the hard-to-articulate, rarely reported phenomenon of sperm smuggling by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The sperm is smuggled out by loved ones so that they may conceive. The film underscored the cruelty of imprisoning Palestinians for years without trial while affirming the basic human instinct to reproduce. Bonboné premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and won the Best Short Film award at the Moscow International Film Festival in 2018.

The Key, a short from 2023 based on the Palestinian writer Anwar Hamed’s short story, takes on the omnipresent yet improbable question of the Palestinian right to return. In the film, a well-placed Israeli family begins to hear the mysterious rattling of a key in their apartment’s lock. The noise fails to register on the surveillance cameras. Mayasi dedicated the film to “all Palestinians eager to return home”.

Two sisters, one debt

In Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, we follow a Bedouin family whose grown daughters fall victim to the repercussions of an accident caused by a cousin, an event that upends their lives. Though a mild departure from the searing portraits of Palestinians in his earlier work, it is a gentle yet incisively probing exploration of the precarity of Bedouin women’s lives in the Beqaa valley. It is also the coming of age of a filmmaker whose slow-burning career has been dotted with the difficulty of securing funds to make the films he wants as an independent Palestinian filmmaker in Europe.

The Beqaa valley, straddling eastern Lebanon along the border with Syria, is a lush and fertile region where hillocks are studded with shrubbery and fields of moist soil nurture vegetable crops that supply food to the whole region. Milk cows provide sustenance and livelihood. The valley’s people live a way of life that is fast disappearing as modernity creeps in: smartphones, automobiles, and houses of stone and brick. The push and pull between modernity and an ancient way of life commands the lives of the valley’s Bedouins.

The film opens with visuals of a pickup truck burning to a cinder one balmy night. It slowly dawns on us that a girl, Gamra, may have been responsible for this act of vandalism, a girl slighted by a man who promised to marry her only to desert her for another woman. An act of violent feminist outrage it might be, but the incident sets in motion a series of events that exposes the perilous tribal misogyny ruling the valley.

Into this trap fall Rim and Jawaher of the Al Mawla family. During the search for Gamra in his jeep, their cousin Yasser causes a fatal accident, killing a man from a rival tribe. The death creates tension in the valley. After a three-day truce, when negotiations break down, it becomes apparent that Jawaher, a quiet and mature nurse, and Rim, the sprightly younger sister, will have to be traded as bargaining chips and carted off to be married into the rival tribe to avoid a bloodbath.

In many ways, Mayasi’s film juxtaposes the seeping in of modernity with outdated mores, exposing the society’s core as superficial. Where lives are dictated by the strictures of a tightly controlled patriarchal society, archaic traditions are bound to be perpetuated, and the society sacrifices its women, time and again.

The Kiarostami imprint

Employing non-professional actors, drawn from the Al Mawla family in the valley, and improvising dialogue on set, Mayasi crafts a hypnotically atmospheric film whose lingering shots and sparse dialogue call for an immersive viewing experience.

Mayasi is a protégé of the Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, whose unobtrusively observant social-realist ethos is imprinted all over the film. Speaking of his association with Kiarostami, he says: “After graduating from film school in Lebanon, I went to South Korea in 2010 and did a workshop mentored by Abbas Kiarostami, who taught us to look deeper into the meaning of ‘film truth’, and whose work I love.”

The relentlessness of war was perpetually in the background as he shot the film on location in the valley. “We were filming in a moment of so-called ceasefire,” he says in an interview. “But it was a ceasefire from one side. Israeli jets were still bombing in Syria and further away in Lebanon. It was not directly next to us, but behind the mountain where we were filming. At times I had to repeat takes twice because of the sound of an explosion over the dialogue.”

According to Mayasi, the real struggle for Palestinians like him in the diaspora is the difficult reality of their identity. As what remains of Palestine is slowly obliterated by Israeli aggression before the world’s eyes, objects that document memory become an essential part of the diaspora’s remembrance culture.

“Being Palestinian helps me with the specificity of registering memory and working with cinema and audiovisual as a tool to preserve identity,” he says. “At the end of the day, our identity is heritage and it has to be preserved, and one of the most powerful ways to keep it intact is by registering time and space, which is audiovisual, cinema. This kind of struggle empowered me to speak up and let the world hear me.”

Is Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep an indictment of patriarchy? An exposé of the plight of women under rigid social strictures in the tribal system? Or, perhaps, a testament to the success of filmmaking in the face of adversity, including Israel’s continued war on Lebanon despite the so-called ceasefire? However one considers it, the film is a passionately observed and entirely mesmerising documentation of humanity and the lack of it.

Speaking of the future of the Beqaa valley, Mayasi says: “With the Israeli aggressions on Lebanon, I am always afraid something will happen to them,” referring to the Bedouin people in the valley who were part of the film. In telling the story of Rim and Jawaher through Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, Mayasi sidesteps the orientalist’s lens and instead documents a vanishing way of life, even as it sits uneasily alongside modernity.

Prathap Nair is a freelance culture journalist based in Düsseldorf, Germany. 

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