Screen/Society--"Do You Love Me" (Lana Daher, 2025)

Film screening:

"Do You Love Me" (Lana Daher, 2025, 75 min, France/Lebanon/Germany/Qatar; in French, Arabic, and English with English subtitles, DCP)

DO YOU LOVE ME is a playful and personal journey through Lebanon's audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, 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 (among the notable works included are films by Jocelyne Saab and Nadine Labaki), the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory. To accompany the film, director Lana Daher has created a website, https://doyouloveme.film, which serves as an annotated index of her sources.

"The glorious product of reclamation and meticulous research, and an urgent dispatch from an embattled nation, DO YOU LOVE ME proffers a people's history that eschews linear chronology to offer instead a rich rhyming network of generation-crossing associations. A film of intimacy and alienation, of destruction and renewal, of grief and resilience." -- Metrograph

"Director Lana Daher achieves something extraordinary. Through her meticulous, years-long, almost obsessive process, she has created a poetic film in a form we have never seen before." -Jury Statement, Political Film Award of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung at Hamburg Film Festival 2025

"Critic's Pick! A delicately wrought and tonally complex airing of shared traumas that also breathes with a sense of community... DO YOU LOVE ME serves as a coming-to-terms and as a vibrant counternarrative to the numbing closed circuit of a Lebanon enduring attacks to this day, while asserting the right to an identity outside that context." -- Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times