Do You Love Me

Urban symphony Do You Love Me takes us on a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. This love letter to Beirut encompasses 70 years of film, television, home movies, and photographs, exploring Lebanese collective psyche marked by joy and intimacy, devastation and loss. Through the eyes of Lebanese citizens, filmmakers, and artists, this impressive archival documentary reconstructs the fragmented history of a country that has no national archives and does not suffer from archive fever. As Lebanon currently experiences the brunt of war and Israeli bombing, filmmaker Lana Daher’s film is a defiant celebration of creative expression that invokes resistance, renewal, and preservation of memory.

“I was born in 1983 in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. The cycles of violence and an uneasy calm that shaped my childhood continue to define life here. Having lived through endless waves of conflict, I have witnessed their impact on the generations that came before and after me. In our schools, we do not have a common history textbook, and no one speaks about the past in public. This absence led me to the archives, to search, to collect, and listen. To understand not only past events, but also the present we inhabit. Beirut is my home. It is a city that levitates in the in-between, torn between violence and endurance, fragility and renewal. It is imbued with a strong sense of identity and perseverance, but also with deep vulnerability. To live here is to constantly navigate extreme situations over and over again. The film essay Do You Love Me is a reflection on the Beirut of today told through archival clips of local poems and photographs. By reinterpreting them, I try to distill the multi-layered reality of this magnificent city – its memory, resilience, joy and tenderness – to give these images a new life and open a space in which we can explore, remember and feel directly.” (Lana Daher)