A Love Letter to Beirut

Do You Love Me is a sensory masterpiece that asks what happens when a people without an archive remember together. Composed entirely of 70 years of stolen and salvaged footage—home videos that bleed into bombings, wedding footage interspersed with newsreels, pop songs scored over checkpoints—this experimental film offers an alternative history of Lebanon far beyond the official state archive.

Director Lana Daher constructs a narrative that steps outside the colonial gaze, weaving audiovisual fragments into a profound meditation on collective memory and love. The film abandons prescriptive direction, trusting the audience to find meaning in the accumulation of images: intimate domestic moments juxtaposed with violence, family celebrations alongside political rupture.

Composed from decades of audiovisual fragments—archival footage, Beiruti street life, personal recordings—Do You Love Me becomes a sensory immersion into identity, resistance, and the question of how we remember together.

Part of the SİNELECTION program at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA.

Read more