“Genre-defying” can be an overused term these days, but entries like Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi’s lyrical feature debut “Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep” earns it, playing quietly and inventively by its own genre-free rules. A tone poem and an observational, fly-on-the-wall yarn more interested in the specificity of mood and atmosphere than story, the film takes viewers inside the traditions and patriarchal rituals of the Bedouin tribes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. These pastoral people, also called “desert dwellers,” have been on the same soil for hundreds of years, going through the changes of settled life. (A different segment of the society was also the main subject of Elite Zexer’s 2016 award-winner “Sand Storm.”) But as Mayasi’s quietly attentive film articulates, their male-controlled customs still loom large.
Then again, patriarchy, however hidden, seems to still rule the day in other places too, even in more progressive corners of the world where women often pay a price or are asked to apologize for male wrongdoings. With that backdrop, Mayasi’s visual and narrative priorities, rejecting both judgment and moral superiority, render his film all the more powerful. He makes a clear choice to reflectively witness his characters’ choices and predicaments, despite the otherwise happenstance nature of the film — made without a traditional script, and with only first-time non-professional actors in the ensemble.
