Do You Love Me (2026)

Lana Daher’s debut characteristic, Do You Love Me (2026), is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Lebanon’s cultural reminiscence. The Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist drew from 70 years of discovered footage and archival materials to assemble this visceral 76-minute portrait of Lebanese historical past, which premiered at Venice Days and is now taking part in at Metrograph in New York. Daher stitches collectively clips from her nation’s impartial cinema, newsreels, and residential films, inflicting the previous and the current to collide and recontextualize one another anew.

As Daher cuts between time intervals, she toggles between scenes from motion films and newsreel footage of violence on the streets of Beirut, blurring the excellence between what’s actual and what’s staged. On a regular basis civilians and intellectuals opine on the Lebanese Civil Conflict and political confessionalism in Arabic and French. Newlyweds dance and kids have a good time birthdays; households seek for lacking family members and mourn these they’ve misplaced. On the soundtrack, conventional Center Japanese music provides approach to catchy, modern hip-hop. In a scene from the Beirut-set I Wish to See (2008), Catherine Deneuve, taking part in a well-known actress, asks about an empty residence constructing and is advised it’s now a warfare monument. Earlier, the groundbreaking filmmaker and journalist Jocelyne Saab, in an excerpt from considered one of her personal documentaries, wearily laments the lack of 150 years of household historical past as she studies from the wreckage of her demolished dwelling, the results of yet one more Israeli bombardment. Taken collectively, all of this footage reinforces Daher’s preliminary thesis, that “disorientation is a part of the journey” to understanding her beloved homeland.

I reached out to Daher to debate the making of Do You Love Me, her collaboration with the Paris-based Syrian editor Qutaiba Barhamji (who additionally edited Kaouther Ben Hania’s 4 Daughters, 2023, and the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab, 2025), and the significance of centering the feminine perspective when narrating the usually ignored historical past of her nation.

Lauren Wissot: May you discuss a bit in regards to the origin of Do You Love Me? Did it start as a analysis undertaking, or had you all the time envisioned it as a documentary movie?

Lana Daher: The movie began in 2018 as analysis into the connection between warfare and music; how music carries reminiscence and strikes by way of battle. It started with a selected give attention to the Bendaly Household [the popular Lebanese band], which is the place the movie’s title [a reference to one of their songs] comes from. It was all the time supposed to be an archive-based doc, however little by little, I noticed that what mattered to me was rather more private: my very own relationship with Beirut, my very own childhood, my very own traumas; our relationship to reminiscence and historical past as a society. That’s when the movie actually discovered its form.

At its core, it’s actually a love letter to my metropolis, born out of a necessity to indicate what life in Lebanon truly looks like, marked as it’s by fixed disaster, and the way that has formed me by way of each stage of my life. It was vital to me to seize not simply occasions, however feelings, contradictions, and the humanity of individuals residing in a rustic in everlasting disaster.

LW: I’m additionally curious the way you went about gathering the supply materials, particularly since Lebanon has no nationwide archive. The place did you even begin?

LD: This sort of work is nearer to a hunt than a search since Lebanon has neither a nationwide archive nor even a unified historical past e book. Greater than half the footage within the movie comes from impartial Lebanese cinema. We used [footage from] about 106 fiction and documentary options, [produced] from 1958 to right this moment. We additionally introduced in journalistic footage, dwelling movies, images, podcasts, music movies, radio, and even deserted archives. The oldest materials is a house video from 1928. I ended up with greater than 20,000 audiovisual fragments throughout [multiple] laborious drives. Roughly seven p.c of all the pieces I researched made it into the ultimate movie, and altogether, we cleared near 400 rights contracts.

Like many Lebanese households, mine misplaced most of its personal archive throughout the wars and waves of migration. So, rising up, I had restricted entry to my family’s historical past and nearly none to Lebanese cinema itself. That absence was a part of why I needed to construct one thing from the within, manufactured from Lebanese folks talking about themselves in their very own voices and [seeing] by way of their very own eyes.

LW: May you talk about the enhancing course of, together with the choice to not comply with a strict chronology, because you observe within the movie that “disorientation is a part of the journey” in Lebanon? And what was it like collaborating with Qutaiba Barhamji, who additionally served as cowriter?

LD: Enhancing was the guts of the movie from the beginning since I knew I needed to construct it completely from the archive, with no voiceover and no single central determine. I truly labored alone for nearly 5 years, sometimes with junior researchers, earlier than assembly Qutaiba. I had a four-hour tough minimize by then. After we met, he requested whether or not we must always work off that or begin from scratch. I advised him, “No, we begin from scratch!”

I intentionally selected to work with an editor who wasn’t Lebanese, and who didn’t carry the identical attachment to the pictures, occasions, and traumas that I had. If a scene didn’t open into one thing extra common, we let it go. And we set guidelines early: no full scenes lifted from present movies, and no Lebanese politicians on display screen or on the soundtrack. Then we labored intuitively, fragmenting and recombining remoted photographs.

I didn’t desire a linear chronology exactly as a result of reminiscence isn’t linear and neither is trauma. What holds the movie collectively as an alternative is an emotional logic: the rhythm and the associations constructed by way of enhancing and sound design.

LW: Since Do You Love Me options fairly a number of clips from the journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s oeuvre, notably Lebanon in Turmoil [1975], it’s fairly becoming the collection “Jocelyne Saab: Letters from Lebanon” is accompanying the movie’s Metrograph run. Which makes me marvel how Saab has influenced your personal work as a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist in Beirut’s artwork and music scenes, if in any respect. Are there different pioneering creatives you look to as touchstones?

LD: I’m an enormous fan of Saab’s work. By means of her movies, I understood what had occurred, and why the world round me was the best way it was. She’s so brave. She filmed the horrors of that point as they have been unfolding. Although I don’t assume Saab particularly influenced me greater than different ladies filmmakers. Additionally, I believe the creatives that encourage me will not be essentially simply filmmakers. Typically, it’s extra the method behind a piece relatively than the ultimate outcome that I discover inspiring.

Past [the influence of] any particular person filmmaker, I used to be very aware all through the filmmaking means of the presence—and absence—of girls’s views within the archive itself. A powerful feminine perspective runs by way of Do You Love Me, which issues to me exactly as a result of it’s a story that’s typically underrepresented. A lot of what survives as “the document”—dwelling movies, household images, private collections—was shot, saved, and handed down by ladies, even once they weren’t those holding the digital camera. Ladies have been typically witnesses to time in essentially the most literal sense: they have been those who preserved what no person thought to institutionalize. Working with that materials meant that the movie ended up centering ladies’s gazes and their presence.

Extra broadly, the movie can also be an homage to the filmmakers, journalists, musicians, photographers, and writers whose work I drew from—the folks whose complete practices have been already engaged with the identical questions the movie asks. I imagine that by layering my very own illustration of Beirut over their present ones, their power and love for this place is carried contained in the movie even the place it isn’t express.

LW: Watching the movie a number of months in the past, throughout CPH:DOX, I used to be struck by its theme of collective reminiscence being in a continuing state of erasure in Lebanon, and of pictures solely representing part of a fact at a specific time for sure of us. However now that your nation is presently, sadly, caught within the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah, are there different themes or classes you’re feeling are essential to impart to audiences each dwelling and overseas?

LD: Let me first push again on the framing of that query, as lowering what is occurring right this moment to a confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah truly overlooks a for much longer historical past. Lebanon isn’t merely “caught within the crossfire” between Israel and Hezbollah. It’s not possible for me to place Israel and Hezbollah on the identical degree. They’re not equal, and nothing about this warfare is equal. The south of Lebanon has been devastated, with complete cities and villages erased. This historical past didn’t start with Hezbollah. Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978, earlier than Hezbollah [was founded], and it has repeatedly invaded and occupied elements of the nation over the previous 5 a long time.

So, diving into the archive meant confronting a historical past that isn’t taught and that we don’t actually have entry to. It confirmed me the repetition in our [historical] cycles. We’re residing by way of one other warfare in Lebanon proper now, and I believe our deepest drawback isn’t solely the exterior enemies, but in addition how fragmented we’re internally. I ended making an attempt to clarify the nation in a traditional method and discovered as an alternative to simply accept it in its full and unresolved complexity.

Screening the movie in Beirut for its Lebanese premiere throughout this warfare was one thing else completely. At one screening, I noticed the Israeli drone exterior had change into a part of our sound design; actuality and the archive collapsed into one another. Some folks go away the movie feeling lighter, remembering that Lebanese folks wish to stay, not battle. Others go away sadder, afraid they have been born into warfare and can die in a warfare.

I really hope the movie reminds those that Lebanon isn’t simply one other war-torn nation the place loss of life turns into a statistic. We’re folks with tales, humor, and tenderness; we’re folks vigorous. This humanity deserves to be seen. Trauma is inherited right here whether or not we select it or not, handed by way of silence as a lot as by way of speech. If this movie can operate as one thing like a nationwide archive—not official, not full, however alive and felt—that looks like sufficient. I all the time used to say that I would like the movie to, in a way, “maintain house” for our emotions. To this point, it’s been doing simply that.