Lana Daher welcomes us to her office-apartment in the Abdel Wahab neighborhood in Achrafieh. It is here, since 2018, that she has been diligently crafting her documentary Do You Love Me, which has been recognized with multiple accolades, including the most recent IDFA Rough Cut Award, which she won in November 2024.

Just like this space illuminated by the golden light of a January afternoon in Beirut, the director seems as rooted in this city as the city is rooted in her. She speaks about Beirut, about the complex yet unbreakable bond with this city where she grew up and spent most of her life, not merely as a place she comes from, but as a complex and almost inexplicable relationship with a living being. Indeed, just a glance at her round blue eyes, reveals the intensity, intelligence and at any rate the sensitivity with which she devours and questions this country and this city, which she has made both the backdrop, the main character, and the raw material of her documentary that she plans to present at festivals starting in spring 2025. That said, when watching the sixty-minute rough cut of her film, one hesitates to label Do You Love Me strictly as a documentary, as this work transcends borders between different cinematic genres.

This film emerges more as a poignant tapestry woven from snippets of personal documents, television archives and particularly fragments from over 100 Lebanese films spanning from the 60s to today, whose assembly forms an alternative collective history, one that belongs to us and to the generations that preceded us.

A collective and personal memory erased

To understand the driving force behind this project, one must return to Daher’s childhood, more specifically to the year 1990, when her family returned from West Africa following the end of the Civil War and the signing of the Taif Agreement.

“I spent most of my free time in my grandmother's apartment in Mar Elias, watching Remi Bandali's performances,” she says. “When I started thinking about my first feature film, I naturally found myself investigating that period of my childhood, that fascination with Bandali, who was a kind of marker of that era and an early connection with my country. Especially since I didn’t understand why there was no collective narrative told to us at school, and particularly why at home, we had no photo albums, no trace of our personal memory.”

The process of developing and making Do You Love Me thus overlaps with a personal quest, for Daher to understand how “we, the Lebanese, got here, and why the same cycles repeat from generation to generation without ever truly being told in a detached manner.” To do so, to restore the memory and offer her reinterpretation of Lebanese history from the 60s to the present day “but through an emotional and psychological prism, not from a traditional historical viewpoint,” Daher takes detours, gathering clues, fragments in family documents, journalistic archives and mainly Lebanese cinematic works whose pieces she fits together like reassembling the puzzle of a shattered memory.

“It was my way of finding elsewhere, and differently, our history that was taken from us,” she emphasizes. Supported by editor Qutaïba Barhamji, whose work she admires (having worked on Four Daughters, Little Palestine and How to Save a Dead Friend), she notes that the main challenge was “to manage to draw from these important works and integrate them into my film while creating an original, personal work that keeps the viewer within my film and doesn't just repeat the content from the films I use.”

Another challenge, and quite a significant one, arose in 2019 when the country's context and the subject of Do You Love Me suddenly intertwined in a troubling absurdity. “The socio-economic crisis of 2019, followed by the double explosion in August 2020, meant that, on the one hand, every time I thought the documentary was finished, something worse would happen and change the narrative’s direction. On the other hand, I had to work around the theme of this cycle of violence that has shaken the country for over 50 years, while also processing what I was experiencing during that year. Even though I was almost paralyzed during that year, I also had confirmation that this cycle of violence deserved more than ever to be told.”

The same questions, the same cycles of violence

But beyond this idea of a vicious cycle, of endlessly repeating the same history, the same traumas, the same wounds passed down almost like a curse from generation to generation, Do You Love Me maps out the complexities of the Lebanese experience. “The idea, the ultimate goal of this project is to subtly narrate, from an emotional and almost psychological perspective, what it is like to live in Lebanon. Especially in Beirut, which has always been at the heart of our dramas,” asserts Lana Daher. It is therefore subtly, through a mechanism of back-and-forth between older and more recent works, that the director integrates into the eighty minutes of Do You Love Me the sum of the major questions that define the existence of all Lebanese people. And in this sense, she succeeds brilliantly in transforming something deeply personal into a story that belongs to an entire people, for over fifty years.

Wrapped in a soundtrack that spans an entire era, from the Rahbani to Scrambled Eggs, through the Bandali and Rayyes Bek, the sequences of the documentary subtly evoke the feelings and profound questions that define the Lebanese human condition. They explore those void moments, between relief and incomprehension, that slip in between crises when one must relearn how to get back on their feet and begin anew. They dissect the ambivalence of our relationship with this country, between the desire to leave and the impossibility of turning our backs on this land. They reveal the fragility of this country thrown onto the wrong side of the world and the impossibility of uniting as a people around a common story. They question the idea of home, and how here, the home, the land, are vulnerable, doomed to disappear at any moment.

Produced by Lana Daher (My Little Films - Lebanon), Jean-Laurent Csinidis (Films de Force Majeure - France), and co-produced by Jasper Mielke (Wood Water Films - Germany), with the support of ARTE France – La Lucarne, al-Jazeera, CNC – FSA, the International Organisation of La Francophonie, the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Europe Creative MEDIA, Doha Film Institute, IDFA Bertha Fund, Sundance Institute, AFAC, the Lebanese Film Fund of the Fondation Liban Cinéma, Procirep-Angoa and the Region Sud, Do You Love Me (currently in post-production) will be released in theaters in 2026, after a festival tour planned for 2025. While its title is initially borrowed from a song by the Bandali Brothers, it holds a different meaning for Lana Daher today. “The title reflects the eternal question we ask when thinking about Lebanon. Does it love us as much as we love it? It also speaks to this unconditional attachment we have for this country, like the love one might have for a human being, a close friend or a troubled lover, whom one can’t resent and is therefore impossible to stop loving.”