Un Certain Regard as Palestinian Cinema Claims Its Moment
Rakan Mayasi’s debut feature — shot without a script in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley with non-professional actors — arrives at the 79th festival backed by the Doha Film Institute, the Red Sea Film Foundation and world sales agent Salaud Morisset.
There is a particular kind of film that Cannes’ Un Certain Regard was built for: work that operates outside industry comfort zones, that chooses landscape over spectacle and silence over exposition. Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep, the debut feature from Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi, lands squarely in that tradition — and its selection at the 2026 edition of the festival marks one of the most closely watched world premieres of this year’s programme.
The 100-minute drama unfolds in the fog-shrouded Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, where a truck is set ablaze and a young woman named Gamra disappears. In the aftermath, two sisters — Jawaher and Reem — are offered by their family as atonement, while their cousin Yaser navigates old grudges and simmering tensions in his search for the missing girl. The film is, at its core, a portrait of what women carry in silence within tightly coded communities — and of a land, as the film’s own synopsis describes it, “that holds its breath, waiting for something to end… or begin.”
What makes the project remarkable is as much its making as its subject matter. Mayasi shot the film entirely without a script, working exclusively with non-professional actors in a hybrid fiction-nonfiction mode that draws from his own deeply considered artistic philosophy. “I do not want to feel constrained by the size of the machines,” the director has stated, “as that would prevent me from blending into the community and being a part of it.” The result is a work shaped by proximity — to its characters, its landscape, its silences.
The personal roots of the story run deep. Mayasi has spoken about his grandmother’s experience of being forced into marriage at fourteen, a story that stayed with him since childhood and eventually became the emotional engine behind this project. The Bekaa Valley setting was chosen deliberately, as a place where tribal traditions still operate with real force.
Mayasi’s trajectory as a filmmaker is one of rigorous, cross-cultural training. Born in Germany and based between Brussels and Beirut, he studied cinema, theatre and psychology in Lebanon before receiving mentorship from the late Abbas Kiarostami at the Asian Film Academy in South Korea. He later trained with Hungarian master Béla Tarr in Budapest and holds an MA in Filmmaking from LUCA School of Arts in Belgium. His short films have screened at Locarno, TIFF and SXSW — with Bonboné (2017) acquired by Netflix and The Key (2023) picked up by Canal+ internationale.
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep is a co-production between Palestine, Belgium, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, reflecting the kind of multi-territory collaboration that has become increasingly essential for independent Arab cinema to reach the global market. The Doha Film Institute provided post-production support through its Fall 2025 Grants cycle, and the Red Sea Film Foundation has also publicly claimed the project as one of its supported titles. World sales have been boarded by Paris-based Salaud Morisset, with a France distribution deal already in place ahead of the Cannes premiere.
The film is one of only two Arab productions selected for Un Certain Regard this year, alongside Moroccan director Laïla Marrakchi’s La Más Dulce — a pairing that positions Arab cinema as a coherent, plural force within this year’s competitive programme rather than a token presence.
For Mayasi, Cannes 2026 represents a debut on cinema’s largest stage. His second feature script, The Passport, was already selected for La Fabrique des Cinéastes at Cannes 2025, signalling that the industry’s attention to his work is not contingent on a single film. But Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep is the work that will define how the world first sees him — and, in the fog of the Bekaa Valley, what it finds may be difficult to look away from.
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep world premieres in Un Certain Regard at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, running May 12–23, 2026.