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Do You Love Me Reassembles Lebanon’s Cultural Memory
Do You Love Me (2026) Lana Daher’s debut feature, Do You Love Me (2026), is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Lebanon’s cultural memory. The Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist drew from 70 years of found footage and archival material to assemble this visceral 76-minute portrait of Lebanese history, which premiered at Venice Days and is now playing at Metrograph in New York. Daher stitches together clips from her country’s independent cinema, newsreels, and home movies, causing the past and the present to collide and recontextualize each other anew.
As Daher cuts between time periods, she toggles between scenes from action movies and newsreel footage of violence on the streets of Beirut, blurring the distinction between what is real and what is staged. Everyday civilians and intellectuals opine on the Lebanese Civil War and political confessionalism in Arabic and French. Newlyweds dance and children celebrate birthdays; families search for missing loved ones and mourn those they’ve lost. On the soundtrack, traditional Middle Eastern music gives way to catchy, contemporary hip-hop. In a scene from the Beirut-set I Want to See (2008), Catherine Deneuve, playing a famous actress, asks about an empty apartment building and is told it’s now a war monument. Earlier, the groundbreaking filmmaker and journalist Jocelyne Saab, in an excerpt from one of her own documentaries, wearily laments the loss of 150 years of family history as she reports from the wreckage of her demolished home, the result of yet another Israeli bombardment. Taken together, all of this footage reinforces Daher’s initial thesis, that “disorientation is part of the journey” to understanding her beloved homeland.
I reached out to Daher to discuss the making of Do You Love Me, her collaboration with the Paris-based Syrian editor Qutaiba Barhamji (who also edited Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, 2023, and the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab, 2025), and the importance of centering the female perspective when narrating the often overlooked history of her country.
Lauren Wissot: Could you talk a bit about the origin of Do You Love Me? Did it begin as a research project, or had you always envisioned it as a documentary film?
Lana Daher: The film started in 2018 as research into the relationship between war and music; how music carries memory and moves through conflict. It began with a specific focus on the Bendaly Family [the popular Lebanese band], which is where the film’s title [a reference to one of their songs] comes from. It was always intended to be an archive-based doc, but little by little, I realized that what mattered to me was much more personal: my own relationship with Beirut, my own childhood, my own traumas; our relationship to memory and history as a society. That’s when the film really found its shape.
At its core, it’s really a love letter to my city, born out of a need to show what life in Lebanon actually feels like, marked as it is by constant crisis, and how that has shaped me through every stage of my life. It was important to me to capture not just events, but emotions, contradictions, and the humanity of people living in a country in permanent crisis.
LW: I’m also curious how you went about gathering the source material, especially since Lebanon has no national archive. Where did you even start?
LD: This kind of work is closer to a hunt than a search since Lebanon has neither a national archive nor even a unified history book. More than half the footage in the film comes from independent Lebanese cinema. We used [footage from] about 106 fiction and documentary features, [produced] from 1958 to today. We also brought in journalistic footage, home videos, photographs, podcasts, music videos, radio, and even abandoned archives. The oldest material is a home video from 1928. I ended up with more than 20,000 audiovisual fragments across [multiple] hard drives. Roughly seven percent of everything I researched made it into the final film, and altogether, we cleared close to 400 rights contracts.
Like many Lebanese families, mine lost most of its own archive across the wars and waves of migration. So, growing up, I had limited access to my own family’s history and almost none to Lebanese cinema itself. That absence was part of why I wanted to build something from the inside, made of Lebanese people speaking about themselves in their own voices and [seeing] through their own eyes.
LW: Could you discuss the editing process, including the decision to not follow a strict chronology, since you observe in the film that “disorientation is part of the journey” in Lebanon? And what was it like collaborating with Qutaiba Barhamji, who also served as cowriter?
LD: Editing was the heart of the film from the start since I knew I wanted to build it entirely from the archive, with no voiceover and no single central figure. I actually worked alone for almost five years, occasionally with junior researchers, before meeting Qutaiba. I had a four-hour rough cut by then. When we met, he asked whether we should work off that or start from scratch. I told him, “No, we start from scratch!”
I deliberately chose to work with an editor who wasn’t Lebanese, and who didn’t carry the same attachment to the images, events, and traumas that I had. If a scene didn’t open into something more universal, we let it go. And we set rules early: no full scenes lifted from existing films, and no Lebanese politicians on screen or on the soundtrack. Then we worked intuitively, fragmenting and recombining isolated shots.
I didn’t want a linear chronology precisely because memory isn’t linear and neither is trauma. What holds the film together instead is an emotional logic: the rhythm and the associations built through editing and sound design.
LW: Since Do You Love Me features quite a few clips from the journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s oeuvre, notably Lebanon in Turmoil [1975], it’s quite fitting the series “Jocelyne Saab: Letters from Lebanon” is accompanying the film’s Metrograph run. Which makes me wonder how Saab has influenced your own work as a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist in Beirut’s art and music scenes, if at all. Are there other pioneering creatives you look to as touchstones?
LD: I’m a huge fan of Saab’s work. Through her films, I understood what had happened, and why the world around me was the way it was. She’s so courageous. She filmed the horrors of that time as they were unfolding. Though I don’t think Saab specifically influenced me more than other women filmmakers. Also, I think the creatives that inspire me are not necessarily just filmmakers. Sometimes, it’s more the process behind a work rather than the final result that I find inspiring.
Beyond [the influence of] any individual filmmaker, I was very conscious throughout the filmmaking process of the presence—and absence—of women’s perspectives in the archive itself. A strong female perspective runs through Do You Love Me, which matters to me precisely because it’s a narrative that’s often underrepresented. So much of what survives as “the record”—home videos, family photographs, personal collections—was shot, kept, and passed down by women, even when they weren’t the ones holding the camera. Women were often witnesses to time in the most literal sense: they were the ones who preserved what nobody thought to institutionalize. Working with that material meant that the film ended up centering women’s gazes and their presence.
More broadly, the film is also an homage to the filmmakers, journalists, musicians, photographers, and writers whose work I drew from—the people whose entire practices were already engaged with the same questions the film asks. I believe that by layering my own representation of Beirut over their existing ones, their energy and love for this place is carried inside the film even where it isn’t explicit.
LW: Watching the film a few months ago, during CPH:DOX, I was struck by its theme of collective memory being in a constant state of erasure in Lebanon, and of images only representing a part of a truth at a particular time for certain folks. But now that your country is currently, unfortunately, caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah, are there other themes or lessons you feel are crucial to impart to audiences both home and abroad?
LD: Let me first push back on the framing of that question, as reducing what is happening today to a confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah actually overlooks a much longer history. Lebanon isn’t simply “caught in the crossfire” between Israel and Hezbollah. It’s impossible for me to put Israel and Hezbollah on the same level. They’re not equal, and nothing about this war is equal. The south of Lebanon has been devastated, with entire towns and villages erased. This history didn’t begin with Hezbollah. Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978, before Hezbollah [was founded], and it has repeatedly invaded and occupied parts of the country over the past five decades.
So, diving into the archive meant confronting a history that isn’t taught and that we don’t really have access to. It showed me the repetition in our [historical] cycles. We’re living through another war in Lebanon right now, and I think our deepest problem isn’t only the external enemies, but also how fragmented we are internally. I stopped trying to explain the country in a conventional way and learned instead to accept it in its full and unresolved complexity.
Screening the film in Beirut for its Lebanese premiere during this war was something else entirely. At one screening, I realized the Israeli drone outside had become part of our sound design; reality and the archive collapsed into each other. Some people leave the film feeling lighter, remembering that Lebanese people want to live, not fight. Others leave sadder, afraid they were born into war and will die in a war.
I truly hope the film reminds people that Lebanon isn’t just another war-torn country where death becomes a statistic. We are people with stories, humor, and tenderness; we are people full of life. This humanity deserves to be seen. Trauma is inherited here whether we choose it or not, passed through silence as much as through speech. If this film can function as something like a national archive—not official, not complete, but alive and felt—that feels like enough. I always used to say that I want the film to, in a sense, “hold space” for our feelings. So far, it’s been doing just that.
