Review: A world is suspended between fog and fate in ‘Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep’
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.
