302. A burning Beirut asks, “Do You Love Me?” 

At the 2025 Venice Film Festival, one of the most talked-about films was the Lebanese docufilm Do You Love Me. 

The film was released in Beirut just a week ago and isn't available on any platform, so I haven’t seen it. I only watched the trailer, read the director’s interview, and received promotional materials shared by a friend. After watching the film, he mentioned that it is an archive-based essay film, but I have no idea what he meant by “essay film”.

Lana Daher’s debut 75-minute film explores 70 years of Lebanon’s audiovisual history. It combines cinema, TV, home videos, photography, and music to create a fragmented yet personal portrait of the country. Lana is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut.

The feature, created entirely from archival footage, assembles fragments from commercial Lebanese cinema and television, as well as personal archives from Daher’s family and friends. 

The director claims that it functions more as a layered memory map of Lebanon than as a straightforward documentary, and that it is a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual history. 

Do You Love Me is a love letter to Beirut, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche, marked by joy and intimacy, as well as destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers, and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history, portrays creative expression as both resistance and renewal, and presents it as a means to preserve memory.

Lana began developing the project in 2018. The film is built on years of searching and listening, drawing material from private collections and abandoned archives. It draws on more than 100 works of independent Lebanese cinema, as well as countless home videos, photographs, podcasts, music, and other media. 

In an interview, Lana says, “Though war is present, it does not define Lebanon. Life in Beirut is not reduced to violence alone; it is also a place of joy, creativity, and profound vitality. Beirut is home. It is a city suspended in the in-between: between violence and endurance, fragility and renewal. It carries a strong sense of identity and perseverance, yet an equally deep vulnerability. Living here means navigating extremes, again and again.”

Lana Daher approaches the film as both an intimate conversation with her city and a generational reckoning with Lebanon’s unresolved past. Lana doesn’t merely revisit history—she reclaims it.