At this year’s Giornate degli Autori in Venice, director Lana Daher presented her film Do You Love Me, a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage.
Described as a love letter to Beirut, the film spans seventy years of film, television, home videos, and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers, and artists, it reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, while celebrating creative expression as an act of resistance, renewal, and preservation.
Daher reflects on memory, resilience, and what it means to ask a city, Do you Love Me?
AM: Your film is built entirely from archival material. How did you navigate between your own memories of Beirut and the collective memory contained in these images?
Lana Daher: The film is entirely built from archival material that spans from home videos as early as the 1920s to Lebanese cinema from the 1950s, leading up to works as recent as 2024. During my research, I had specific questions, but the process led me to unexpected places. I was looking for fragments that echoed my own instincts and memories, but I kept stumbling upon images and sounds that surprised me, some I had forgotten, and others that weren’t mine but felt familiar. In a city like Beirut, where personal histories and collective experiences are so intertwined, I found that the lines blurred very quickly. The material I researched all carried emotional truths that resonated with my own experience. Despite starting from my own perspective, I ended up surrendering to something much broader: a shared, fragmented memory.
AM: You describe Beirut as a city suspended in the in-between between violence and endurance, fragility and renewal. How did you translate this duality into the rhythm and texture of the film?
Lana Daher: Beirut lives in a constant tension between collapse and reinvention, mourning and celebration. Lebanon is not only defined by violence and death; it is also very much defined by life, joy, creativity, and perseverance. I wanted the film’s rhythm to embody that same instability. The structure of the film oscillates between cycles of violence and relative calm, which is very representative of our life in Beirut, even now. There’s an intended sense of repetition in the structure, themes, and cycles that never fully close. The form itself presents strong contrasts: fragile Super 8 footage sits next to saturated pop videos or crisp 4K images. The emotional tone keeps shifting yet also repeats itself, because that’s how it feels to live here. Just when you think you’ve found peace, something unravels. And yet, somehow, we keep going. I wanted all those textures and emotions to coexist within the same space of the film.
AM: Lebanon has no official national archive. In that absence, how did you go about collecting and curating the fragments that became Do You Love Me?
Lana Daher: The absence of an official national archive in Lebanon is a wound, but also an opportunity. It forces you to dig elsewhere. When I started working on the film, I thought we had no access to our history, but what I realized is that it's all there, you just need to look for it. The film, in its form, is a tribute to those who documented, created, and preserved history, especially in systems where governments have failed us. I worked like an archaeologist, reaching out to private collectors, universities, national institutions, families, filmmakers, journalists, artists, and even exploring incredible abandoned archive spaces. Many of the materials were stored in precarious conditions, rusted boxes in humid underground levels of poorly maintained buildings, while others were better preserved. What I discovered wasn’t just footage, but acts of care. People preserved these images because they meant something. Curating the film became about listening closely to what these fragments were saying, even in their silence or decay. It was also about asking: What gets remembered? How do we remember? And what is erased? The research for the film covered over 20,000 documents from various sources, only a portion of which made it into the final edit.
AM: The title itself feels intimate and provocative. Why did you choose Do You Love Me as the question framing the film, and who do you imagine is being asked?
Lana Daher: The title Do You Love Me is, to me, both a plea and a provocation. I was originally inspired by the famous Bendaly Family song. Over the years, I tried many different titles, but eventually this one carried much more meaning than I had initially known. It’s the voice of a city asking its people: Do you still love me, after everything? Do you love me enough to put your political or religious beliefs aside, and instead focus on what it means to be Lebanese? But it’s also my voice, asking Beirut the same question. The phrase is disarming, it opens a space of vulnerability. There’s something almost childlike about it, naïve and dependent, but also deeply political. In a place where love, safety, and one’s sense of home are often tested by the state, by history, or by those who leave, this question felt essential.
AM: Music, cinema, and home videos all appear as acts of resistance and resilience in your film. How important was it for you to highlight Lebanon’s creativity as a form of survival?
Lana Daher: It was absolutely central. In a context where so much has been destroyed physically, politically, and emotionally, creativity becomes a form of survival. Art is one way through which we remember ourselves. It’s also how we resist despair. I didn’t want to romanticize resilience, because it can be exhausting, but I did want to honor it. Especially the small gestures that, to me, are heroic: people filming their families during wartime, composing love songs amid blackouts, making films with no budget. These aren’t just cultural expressions, they’re life rafts. Lebanon’s creative history is a record of everything we’ve refused to forget. My own lived experience since I started developing Do You Love Me in 2018 is a testimony to this. We went through endless crises I could have never imagined, economic collapse, the port explosion, the latest war with Israel, among so many other violent and traumatic events. Working on the film was my very own life raft. It helped me process my environment and overcome extremely difficult times.
AM: What does it mean for you to present this love letter to Beirut at an international stage like Venice, and how do you hope audiences unfamiliar with Lebanon will connect with its layered story?
Lana Daher: Presenting this film at Venice is very emotional and moving for me. It’s a form of witnessing and being seen, not just for me, but for all the voices in the film. It’s a chance to say: Look at us, not through headlines or stereotypes, but through our own representation of ourselves, our images and sounds. For audiences unfamiliar with Lebanon, I hope the film invites curiosity and insight rather than conclusions.