A striking panorama of national collective memory told entirely through archive material in this playful, immersive journey through Lebanon’s history and culture.
%20by%20Maroun%20Bagdadi-2000-2000-1125-1125-crop-fill.jpg?k=4646761257)
%20by%20Fouad%20Elkoury-2000-2000-1125-1125-crop-fill.jpg?k=fa42f4d9e2)
%20by%20Ben%20Hubbard-2000-2000-1125-1125-crop-fill.jpg?k=a0163e81ca)
%20by%20Ayla%20Hibri-2000-2000-1125-1125-crop-fill.jpg?k=26f5309c37)
As freewheeling as a travelogue, Lana Daher’s mercurial documentary eschews talking heads and voiceover, drawing instead from more than 20,000 hours of archival footage to channel the resilient spirit of Beirut.
Do You Love Me 2025
This poetic, layered collage of archival footage spanning 70 years of narrative cinema, television, home videos, news media, music and photography is particularly impressive considering the country has no national media archive.
Filmmaker Lana Daher utilises archive, editing and sound design to construct a powerful document of Lebanon’s turbulent contemporary history where resilience is forced by violent circumstance. Pairing footage of a city destroyed by bombs with sequences of ordinary living; weddings, parties, family gatherings; illustrates the human desire to find joy where we can — even under relentless war and conflict, life goes on.
Working with editor Qutaiba Barhamj (The Voice of Hind Rajab, NZIFF 2026), Daher looks destruction and displacement square in the eye yet never succumbs to despair. Described as “a love letter to Beirut”, the cumulative effect of this feat of audiovisual research is a celebration of memory preservation as resistance, and an open-hearted, emotional portrait of a people.
– Amanda Jane Robinson