Midway through Do You Love Me, Lebanon no longer feels like a place so much as a collection of memories. Hit pop songs drift in and out alongside grainy home videos, forgotten films, photographs and personal testimonies. Past and present blur together. Childhood memories sit alongside war, making nostalgia difficult to separate from loss.
That wasn't the film director Lana Daher originally set out to make.
“When I started, I was interested in the relationship between war and music,” she said. “I wanted to understand how we got here. Why are things the way they are? We don't have one unified history book, and we don't really have a national archive.”
Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, ended without a shared national reckoning, leaving generations to inherit competing versions of the country's past. Like many Lebanese, Daher grew up surrounded by those conflicting narratives and decided to assemble an archive of her own.
Over nearly seven years and drawing from more than 20,000 hours of archival footage, Daher searched through Lebanese independent films, photographs, music, home videos and private collections, building an archive from personal lives rather than official institutions.
“As I was researching that,” she said, referring to her original idea, I realised that's not really what mattered to me. These songs brought me back to a very specific moment in my childhood, and I became more interested in that time, that space, the trauma we've lived through as children and adults, and how we relate to memory.
“I have a lot of voices of normal people, people who are not soldiers, who are not militia fighters, who are not people who come from places of political power. So for me it was really great to be able to sort of share those images and voices with people, and for them to say this looks nothing like what we see on the news,” she added.
Born in Minneapolis in 1983, Daher has spent almost her entire life in Beirut. She belongs to a generation that grew up in the aftermath of the civil war, shaped by its consequences while often being told they were too young to have experienced it.
“The older generation always told us, 'You never lived the civil war,' and they're right,” she said, speaking to The National by phone from Beirut.
“I was very young … my mother told me stories about carrying me across the street while snipers were on the rooftops. We spent nights in shelters. I don't remember much of it, but maybe that's because I've blocked it out.”
What she remembers most vividly is the city that emerged afterwards.
“When the war ended, people who were 18 or 20 suddenly had freedom. They could finally start living again. I was seven. For me, it felt like a prison. I really feel like all I've ever known here is war.”
That recalibration entirely reshaped how she now sees Lebanon's timeline. “I used to look at that timeline differently. I thought it was peace interrupted by war. Now it's war that's occasionally interrupted by this relative calm.”
Building the archive she wanted meant deliberately steering away from the news narratives that so often define Lebanon for international audiences. The film features no politicians speaking to the camera, no party leaders, no military analysts interpreting events.
She avoided large institutional archives too, which she felt reflected a foreign, parachute-journalism lens rather than what Beirut actually feels like.
"Almost half the material comes from Lebanese independent cinema from the 1950s until today," she said. "I wanted the archive to be decolonised. I wanted women to have a strong presence. I wanted ordinary people."
The path there was anything but smooth: Lebanon's financial collapse trapped much of her first grant in local banks; the pandemic stalled her archival research; and in 2020, the Beirut port explosion shook the city — and the project — once again.
"There were months when I wasn't sure I wanted to continue," she said. She worked largely alone for more than two years before bringing in researchers, and later, editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji.
At its New York premiere, the documentary found an audience well beyond Lebanon's diaspora.
“We had a standing ovation,” Daher recalled. “People came up to me afterwards. Some had never been to Lebanon before. Others told me it showed them a completely different side of the country than what they're used to seeing in western media.”
“There were Americans, sometimes second or third-generation immigrants, who related to it,” she said. “At some point, the story stops being only about Lebanon. It becomes about displacement, family and the way societies relate to their own history.”
For Daher, the reaction confirmed the value of the years she spent building it. “Making this film felt like a rite of passage,” she said. “I needed to make it before I could make the next one. I had to work through something in my relationship with Lebanon.
Then she paused.
“It's almost like therapy,” she said. “It's a way of reconnecting with our collective memory.”
'Do You Love Me' is currently screening at the Metrograph in New York.
