Filmmaker Lana Daher draws on 70 years of archival footage in Do You Love Me, her kaleidoscopic love letter to Lebanon and its capital city, Beirut. The film merges the public and the private—from clips from Lebanese films and television shows to Daher’s own home movies and family photographs—to paint a complex portrait of a people and a place that continue to endure despite decades of violence and turmoil. The dizzying array of sounds and images are, for the most part, undated and unlabeled, and lacking anything like a linear chronology, yet as the film tells us in its opening moments, “This disorientation is part of the journey.” It’s a journey full of grief as well as joy, one that looks backward into the past but also forward into the future.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
One of the earliest sequences in Do You Love Me presents an overwhelming series of dates on the screen, dates that whip by so fast that you barely have time to read one before the next one appears, dates that represent various wars and other moments of trauma for the Lebanese people. Yet, as we are reminded frequently throughout the film, there are moments of beauty to be found even amidst bloodshed, reasons to keep living even when many are dying.
Daher and her co-writer and editor Qutaiba Barhamji create an evocative collage of sounds and images that tell us more about the Lebanese people and their resilience than all of the official governmental records in the world ever could. Blood being washed from the streets of Beirut dissolves into waves crashing on sundrenched beaches; bombed out, abandoned streets are juxtaposed against busy marketplaces; people wielding guns transform into people dancing in celebration. (The music used throughout Do You Love Me, including Dalida’s disco classic “Lassez-moi danser,” is as vibrant as the images on the screen.) Ordinary life endures even in extraordinary times, epitomized by clips of people attempting to sleep through revolution on the streets outside their bedroom windows. Houses may be reduced to rubble by Israeli air strikes, but Beirut remains home.
Remembrance of Things Past
As in most (if not all) places with a history of violence, religious clashes are an aspect of Lebanese life that is impossible to ignore. While some people in Do You Love Me believe that the various different religions that exist alongside one another in Lebanon is something that makes the country great, others wonder, “Maybe that’s why we have so many problems.” One particularly poignant sequence in the film involves a woman narrating the story of a childhood birthday party; when her father found out that the one classmate she didn’t invite to her party was the one Muslim girl in her class, he warned her that if she did not invite this girl, she wouldn’t have a party at all. Throughout the film, we see that nothing is ever as simple as what the headlines say in stark black and white.
The need to remember versus the desire to forget is another source of tension throughout Do You Love Me; while some strive to forget the unpleasantness of the past and move on, others nurture their memories, even the traumatic ones, as a crucial part of their identity. As one person notes while contemplating the attempted erasure of collective memory, “Since we have no one to refer to, we no longer know who we are.” This is one of the many reasons why archives are so important: when we don’t preserve what makes a people unique, we make it easier for colonial powers to swoop in and erase them from history. The very existence of Do You Love Me is a bulwark against that happening to Lebanon, and a reminder of how critical it is to protect cultural heritage in any way we can.
Conclusion
Do You Love Me presents archival preservation as a form of self-preservation and filmmaking as a form of resistance, both working together to keep the collective memory of Lebanon alive.
Do You Love Me opens at Metrograph in New York on July 10, 2026.
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