Do You Love Me

Lana Daher explores Lebanon’s audiovisual history in a personal, disorienting and tender journey. Do You Love Me is composed entirely of archival materials—films, television programs, home videos and photographs—that cover the past 70 years. The filmmaker uses them to create a new narrative about her homeland and her hometown, Beirut.

Drawing from more than 2,000 archival sources—visuals and sounds spanning from the Lebanese Civil War to the present—Daher interweaves media fragments by moving back and forth in time. We see a Lebanese journalist returning to a home devastated by Israeli airstrikes, a taxi driver recounting the story of the Murr Tower—a never-completed building that now serves as a war monument—and a guide leading Western visitors around tourist sites.

Daher reflects on Beirut’s collective memory, which, like her film, lacks a strict chronology. In a country where recent history is not part of the school curriculum, this archival film forms a unique testimony to the multilayered identity of Lebanon and its capital.