Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me is a formally audacious and eventually punishing attempt to build Lebanon from its audiovisual remains. Made entirely from archival material, the 75-minute documentary gathers fiction films, news footage, television, photographs, radio, music, and home movies into a history without stable dates, protagonists, or causal lines.
For a while, its collisions are witty and startling. As they accumulate, deliberate disorientation becomes mass-produced, and a film about a country trapped in repetition begins to trap its audience in the repetition of its own method.
That strategy comes from a real problem of access and fragmentation. Lebanon lacks a unified, accessible national audiovisual archive and an agreed-upon school history of its modern conflicts. Daher, who began the project in 2018, searched scattered public, private, and abandoned collections. From a research pool of more than 20,000 potential sources, the finished film draws on seven decades of material and more than 100 works of independent Lebanese cinema.
Yet Do You Love Me does not arrange those fragments into a politically legible history. Its opening text warns that “disorientation is part of the journey”, after which dates and registers rush past one another. The film offers neither an organizing narrator nor a recurring human figure.
Working with editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji, Daher cuts from staged violence to documentary wreckage, from public broadcasts to private celebrations, so quickly that the border between performance and record becomes unstable. Changes in grain, color, aspect ratio, and image quality might help distinguish different eras; their proximity makes them feel simultaneous. Across the montage, bombed buildings from different moments can seem to continue collapsing into one another. The cuts turn historical events into a recurring impact before the audience can absorb the previous shock.
The bodies inside Do You Love Me‘s collage provide a richer counter-rhythm. People dance at weddings, pose for home cameras, crowd apartments, walk along the sea, or occupy streets already claimed by soldiers and rubble. Daher does not control the mise-en-scène inherited from these sources; her intervention lies in selecting and placing their frames side by side.
Her arrangement puts crowded apartments, which compress bodies into private frames, beside streets that open them toward soldiers and rubble, while the sea offers a wider horizon. Practiced fictional gestures sit beside what often looks like self-conscious home-camera performance, and the montage sometimes makes a gesture begun in one source appear to finish in another.
Pierre Armand’s sound design performs a similar act of binding. Rather than rely on a separately credited original score, the film uses songs, radio voices, interviews, recorded testimony, and ambient noise across images that did not originally belong together. The title song by the Bendaly Family gives the collage its most legible refrain, while other musical passages temporarily organize the visual rush around dancing and collective motion. Sound supplies continuity where the cuts refuse it. Over time, however, this binding makes fragments increasingly seem attached to the same emotional current, so historical difference registers less as information than as a break in the film’s flow.
As historical reading, Do You Love Me becomes frustrating. The montage makes Lebanon seem fundamentally unchanged since the 1970s, subordinating political change to repeated images of war, public ruin, and domestic endurance. Set against the distinctions among the 1975–1990 civil war, Israeli invasions and occupation, and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, that compression has consequences.
By withholding stable coordinates, the film can make recurrence do the work that political differentiation would otherwise do. Political change becomes hard to see, while the montage rarely anchors events in identifiable political actors, leaving interests and chains of responsibility harder to trace. Foreign intervention and factional conflict remain perceptible, yet their mechanics dissolve into atmosphere.
Because Do You Love Me presents itself as both a personal journey and a reconstruction of fragmented history, incomprehension cannot automatically count as achievement. The warning about disorientation risks becoming an advance absolution: confusion is intended, therefore confusion cannot count against it.
That leveling also enlarges the film’s collective claim. If Do You Love Me is personal, how far can it recruit the television, radio, cinema, and journalism of a nation to make one sensibility feel collective? Daher withholds a stable first-person narrator, allowing her personal materials to blur into a project whose official synopsis promises an exploration of the “Lebanese collective psyche”.
As war repeatedly cuts back into private rooms, those juxtapositions give that promotional claim a formal basis. They bend the assembled archive toward her image of Beirut, submerged in past and present at once, and let the city stand for the nation. The intimacy is genuine, which makes its presumption that one sensibility can stand in for a Lebanese “we” more consequential, not less.
The title can be heard as turning that tension among attachment, return, and violence into a question from the homeland itself: Do you love me with my bombs, evacuations, and deaths? Will you return to Beirut, step barefoot onto the sand, and cry before the sea? The answer contains love and avoidance at once. In Daher’s collage, Beirut enters identity much as family and language do; it can wound the self without becoming external to it.
Nadav Lapid’s Yes, another 2025 film about war and national attachment, offers a narrower formal contrast in how chaos assigns political agency. Its frantic rhythm and mordant absurdity attack an Israeli elite that converts art into fuel for belligerence. As a fiction, it has different tools, but Lapid’s chaos has bodies to answer for it: a musician and a dancer sell their talent and dignity in rooms organized by wealth and power. Work and performance attach complicity to characters rather than dispersing it across an archive.
Do You Love Me chooses a denser opacity and becomes less a challenge than a closed circuit. Its collage makes belonging palpable through recurring bodies and music bound together by movement, but the same emotional continuity obscures distinctions central to its historical reconstruction and collective scope.
The montage invites viewers to share Daher’s sensation of Beirut, then expands it toward Lebanon without fully clarifying the country’s political divisions. The result can leave viewers inside the closed circuit it has built: able to see the fragments, unable to touch the history that separates them.