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.”
Like many Lebanese people, Daher grew up surrounded by competing versions of history. The brutal 15-year civil war ended without a shared national reckoning, leaving generations to inherit different stories depending on their families, schools and communities. So she set out to build 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 remembered instead was the city that came 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.
“I always knew I didn't want politicians in this film,” she said. “No political parties, no politicians, none of their faces or voices. I wanted the story to come from civil society, from personal experiences and artists.”
She also chose not to rely on large institutional archives. “Those archives usually reflect a foreign perspective,” she said. “Journalists come for a day or two with a very specific lens. I wanted to show 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 – not soldiers, not militia members, not politicians.”
Getting there was far from easy. Ms Daher began the project in 2018. Lebanon's financial collapse trapped much of her first grant in local banks. Then came the pandemic, making archival research increasingly difficult. In 2020, the city was shaken once again, this time by the Beirut port explosion.
“There were months when I wasn't sure I wanted to continue,” she said.
For more than two years, she worked largely on her own before gradually bringing in researchers and, later, editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji.
At its premiere, the film 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.
“It's almost like therapy,” she added. “It's a way of reconnecting with our collective memory.”
