‘A love letter to Beirut’: Lana Daher on sifting 20,000 sources and 70 years of film to make Do You Love Me

Remembering and documentation are radical acts in Lebanon, a country with a tumultuous history and no national archive. Daher’s effervescent cultural collage is a direct challenge to collective amnesia At one point in Lana Daher’s film Do You Love Me, a woman questions the repeated advice of those around her to simply forget Lebanon’s 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Why does she insist on “digging into the past”, especially when “this war was no worse than the others”? Yet it is precisely her act of remembering – of knowing that she “did not dream” the actuality of war – that prompts her to dig “into the present”. The Lebanese director’s debut feature is itself a substantive feat of excavation, with more than 20,000 sources consulted in collaboration with the editor, Qutaiba Barhamji (who worked on The Voice of Hind Rajab), to unearth the footage that would produce this 76-minute film. It is substantive also in the sense that this work was done in relation to a country that does not have a national archive. Continue reading...

By Yassin El-Moudden