Lana Daher’s debut feature, Do You Love Me (2026), arrives as a vital, visceral 76-minute cinematic endeavor that stitches together seven decades of found footage, home movies, newsreels, and independent cinema to construct a sprawling portrait of Lebanon’s cultural memory. Premiering to critical acclaim at Venice Days before securing runs at institutions such as New York’s Metrograph, the Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist’s documentary confronts the cyclical nature of conflict and survival in a nation missing both a national archive and a unified history textbook. By weaving together fragments of fiction and reality, the film collapses temporal boundaries, allowing the past and present to continually recontextualize one another against the backdrop of ongoing geopolitical strife.
Main Facts and Production Genesis
The genesis of Do You Love Me traces back to 2018, when Daher initially embarked on a research project investigating the intricate relationship between music and war—specifically, how auditory culture carries memory through periods of active conflict. The project’s title itself serves as a direct reference to a song by the Bendaly Family, a popular Lebanese band whose music encapsulates a specific era of Lebanese history.
However, as the research deepened, the scope of the project evolved organically. Daher pivoted from a strictly music-ological focus toward a deeply personal inquiry into her own relationship with Beirut, childhood trauma, and the collective psyche of a society perpetually navigating crisis. Functioning ultimately as a cinematic love letter to her home city, the documentary seeks to capture not merely historical events, but the emotional textures, contradictions, and profound humanity of everyday life under the shadow of permanent instability.
The Archival Hunt: Sourcing 70 Years of Visual History
Constructing the documentary presented an extraordinary logistical and archival challenge, given that Lebanon possesses neither a centralized national archive nor an officially sanctioned, universally taught historical narrative. Speaking on the meticulous production process, Daher describes the undertaking less as a traditional research search and more as an archaeological hunt.
To build the visual tapestry of the film, Daher and her team scoured approximately 106 independent Lebanese fiction and documentary features produced between 1958 and the present day. This cinematic material was supplemented by a vast array of journalistic newsreels, personal home videos dating as far back as 1928, archival photographs, podcasts, music videos, radio broadcasts, and forgotten or abandoned domestic collections.
Ultimately, the production accumulated a staggering library of more than 20,000 audiovisual fragments distributed across multiple hard drives. Of this immense archive, roughly seven percent made it into the final 76-minute cut, requiring the clearance of nearly 400 distinct rights contracts. This painstaking assembly reflects a broader cultural reality: much of Lebanon’s domestic history has been repeatedly fractured by successive waves of migration and military conflict, leaving families—including Daher’s own—with fragmented personal archives. By drawing extensively from independent cinema and grassroots artifacts, the film intentionally centers Lebanese voices speaking directly from their own perspectives.
Chronology and Editing Methodology: Rejecting Linear History
A defining characteristic of Do You Love Me is its deliberate rejection of linear chronology. Structured instead around an intuitive, emotional logic, the film mirrors the non-linear nature of trauma and collective memory.
The editing process formed the structural heart of the film from its inception. Daher spent nearly five years working independently on a four-hour rough cut before partnering with Paris-based Syrian editor Qutaiba Barhamji, whose previous credits include acclaimed works such as Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters (2023) and the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025). Rather than refining the existing rough cut, Barhamji and Daher chose to wipe the slate clean and start entirely from scratch.
Seeking an editorial collaborator outside the immediate Lebanese cultural sphere, Daher purposely selected an editor who did not carry the same personal attachment to the specific images, political events, and national traumas embedded in the footage. Together, they established strict editorial guidelines: no full-length scenes were lifted intact from existing films, and Lebanese politicians were entirely excluded from both the screen and the soundtrack. Instead, isolated shots were fragmented and recombined to evoke thematic and emotional associations. As Daher observes within the film itself, "disorientation is part of the journey" when attempting to comprehend the multifaceted reality of Lebanon.
Thematic Threads and Historical Context
Throughout the documentary, Daher engages with the works of pioneering Lebanese creatives, most notably the late filmmaker and journalist Jocelyne Saab. Excerpts from Saab’s archival reportage—such as Lebanon in Turmoil (1975)—are woven into the fabric of the film, creating a conceptual dialogue that was further amplified by accompanying retrospective screenings, including the Metrograph series Jocelyne Saab: Letters from Lebanon.
Saab’s visceral documentation of the Lebanese Civil War serves as an intellectual touchstone for Daher, illustrating the courage required to document atrocities as they unfold. However, Daher’s broader lens extends to the foundational role of women as unintentional archivists of national history. Much of the surviving domestic material utilized in the film—including family photographs, personal letters, and home movies—was preserved, kept, and passed down by women, even when they were not behind the camera. Consequently, Do You Love Me intentionally centers the female gaze, offering an alternative counter-narrative to officially recorded, male-dominated political histories.
Broader Impact, Geopolitical Realities, and Critical Implications
The release of Do You Love Me coincides with a period of severe regional escalation, placing the film in immediate conversation with contemporary geopolitical realities. When questioned about the film’s relevance amid ongoing cross-border conflicts involving Israel and domestic militant factions, Daher has firmly pushed back against reductive framing that equates asymmetric military campaigns to localized crossfire.
Highlighting historical continuity, Daher notes that Lebanon’s struggles predate the formation of modern non-state actors, pointing to successive military incursions and occupations dating back to Israel’s initial invasion in 1978. This historical continuity underscores the core thesis of her archival work: that contemporary populations are continuously subjected to cyclical patterns of violence, compounded by deep internal fragmentation.
Screening the film in Beirut during active wartime introduced a chilling convergence of art and life. During domestic screenings, the ambient sound of real-world Israeli surveillance drones frequently bled into the theater, merging the cinematic soundscape with the immediate present. Audience reactions have reflected this profound tension, with viewers oscillating between a renewed appreciation for the resilience and vibrancy of civilian life and a somber resignation regarding inherited generational trauma.
Ultimately, Do You Love Me operates as an alternative, living national archive—one that is admittedly incomplete and subjective, yet deeply felt. By holding space for the complexities, humor, contradictions, and tenderness of a population consistently reduced to geopolitical statistics, Daher’s debut feature asserts that the humanity of Lebanon’s people endures far beyond the parameters of the conflicts that seek to define them.
