At the center of the story is Yasser, a man searching for his missing cousin when he accidentally kills a member of a rival clan. To prevent the village from erupting into violence, an archaic solution emerges: his sisters may be offered as a form of reconciliation. It is a premise that could easily become melodrama, but Mayasi’s cinema moves differently. His world is slow, atmospheric, almost trance-like, less concerned with explaining violence than with showing how it seeps into land, ritual, silence, and inheritance.
The film extends a social and poetic concern already present in Mayasi’s 2021 short Trumpets in the Sky, but here the subject carries a deeply personal charge. The film is rooted in the memory of the director’s grandmother, who was forced into marriage at the age of 14. Mayasi grew up hearing her story, absorbing it not simply as family history but as a wound that could be reimagined through cinema. Her death, just three months before shooting began, gives the film the feeling of an elegy, a work made not only to remember, but to transform remembrance into image.
That transformation was achieved under conditions as fragile as the world the film depicts. Shot on a modest budget, without the machinery of a conventional production, Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep was made with a small crew and non-professional actors. Mayasi deliberately avoided the rigidity of a traditionally formatted script, pursuing instead a more instinctive, stripped-down form of filmmaking. The result is a film that seems to breathe with its surroundings, as though the camera were discovering the story rather than imposing it.
The atmosphere on set carried its own contradictions. Filming took place during a ceasefire in Lebanon, near the Syrian border, with the sound of fighter jets and explosions still audible beyond the mountains. At the same time, production unfolded during Ramadan, requiring the team to adapt to the rhythms of fasting and ritual. Out of these difficult circumstances came a mood Mayasi remembers as unexpectedly beautiful: a fragile pocket of creation amid tension, discipline, and uncertainty.
There is something almost ceremonial in the way Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep asks to be watched. Mayasi is not interested in speed, exposition, or the neat emotional release of conventional drama. His film invites surrender. Over its 100 minutes, metaphor and mythology coexist with social reality; the viewer is asked to enter the characters’ world slowly, to feel the weight of their environment, and to abandon the usual appetite for answers. It is cinema as immersion, more spell than statement.
Mayasi’s fascination with images began early. Since childhood, he has been drawn to the almost magical act of creating them, a wonder that still appears to guide his work. After studying film in Lebanon, he took part in a 2010 workshop in South Korea mentored by Abbas Kiarostami, whose reflections on cinematic truth left a lasting mark. More recently, training with the late Béla Tarr in Budapest deepened his interest in unconventional forms, cinema that resists formula, spectacle, and ease.
His next project suggests that this appetite for reinvention will continue. Titled The Passeport, Mayasi’s second feature is described as a dark comedy about citizenship, displacement, and bureaucratic absurdity. It follows a man from Gaza who owns a biscuit factory and sets off for Canada to settle an old conflict with his brother, only to die mid-journey on a flight through Belgrade. His body becomes stranded there, caught between borders, laws, and the impossibility of belonging.