Art & Culture

Lana Daher’s ‘Do You Love Me’ is an Invitation to Disturb the Archive

BYMeriem Belhiba

August 6, 2026

There is something conformist about the conventional archive. It selects, orders, names, and preserves, but in doing so it also decides what matters, what remains visible, and who gets to enter. The archivist may be imagined as the guardian of memory, yet no archive exists outside power: somebody built it, somebody classified it, somebody chose what would survive.

Do You Love Me, Lana Daher’s extraordinary portrait of Beirut through some 70 years of images and sound, enters the archive only to disturb that order.

The Lebanese filmmaker spent eight years digging through more than 20,000 audiovisual sources before arriving at the film we see today, a fraction of that enormous research. Yet the sheer scale matters less than what she does with it. Cinema, television, photographs, music videos, independent films and family VHS tapes are stripped of their usual hierarchies and made to coexist.

“I really wanted to put everything on the same level,” Daher tells MILLE at the Amman International Film Festival.

© A Suspended Life (Ghazal el-Banat) (1985) by Jocelyne Saab

She began, partly, because her own archive was insufficient. Her family had not documented enough of their lives and childhood, while Lebanon itself offered no unified national archive she could simply enter and consult. Searching for what was missing, Daher began finding parts of herself elsewhere. In Lebanese cinema, in songs, in strangers’ home videos, in stories created by other people to represent Beirut.

She describes feeling herself inside characters from Lebanese films, as though all of these images belonged to a shared pool of memory. It is one of the film’s most beautiful propositions, that the personal archive does not end with what belongs to you.

A VHS recorded inside someone else’s living room can awaken the texture of your own childhood. A film made decades before you saw it can contain a version of your parents. A Fairuz song can belong to millions of people and still carry an intensely private memory. In Daher’s archive, intimacy is produced as much through recognition as through ownership.

This is why popular culture and independent cinema matter so deeply to Do You Love Me They are not illustrations decorating a political history, but a part of how that history was lived.

Daher knew early on that different kinds of material carried different kinds of feeling. Home videos gave her something especially “raw and vulnerable and tender”; cinema could offer another emotional register entirely. Across the film, generations of Lebanese music also encounter one another: Fairuz, Ziad Rahbani, Bendaly, Melhem Barakat, and Marcel Khalife alongside artists such as Mashrou’ Leila, Bedouin Burger, and Blu Fiefer.

There is a theoretical language for this. Film scholar Paula Amad has written about cinema’s “counter-archival challenge to history”, particularly its capacity to recover the everyday and the anecdotal from the margins of what conventional historiography considers significant. Counter-archives do not cease to be archives; they historicise differently, disrupting established national narratives and the authority of traditional archival institutions.

Daher unquestionably calls what she has created an archive. What makes Do You Love Me counter-archival is the way she refuses to let inherited archival hierarchies dictate how that archive should behave.

© Untitled (1970s) from Al Nidaa Archives

A person crossing a Beirut street can sit beside war. Eating falafel can sit beside destruction. Disco, family outings, television kitsch, a bombed building and an intimate VHS recording can arrive within minutes of one another. The mundane is not the pause between historical events. It is part of history itself.

And in Daher and editor Qutaiba Barhamji’s hands, that disruption produces something remarkably controlled: emotional waves. The film can move from laughter to dread, from recognition to loss, from an exuberant sequence of bodies dancing to the evidence of a country repeatedly collapsing around them. Other critics have noted how fluidly the editing passes between calm, exuberance, and disorder, but its emotional effect comes precisely from refusing the stability of chronology. Memory does not arrive date by date. It catches you through association.

The disruption becomes more deliberate when Daher confronts Lebanon’s archive of violence. There are images she refuses to reproduce. Lebanon’s wars and massacres are heavily documented through corpses, including dead women and children, and Daher did not want to construct yet another history dependent on looking at violated bodies. “I find that unethical,” she says.

Instead, the film searches for other ways to make violence present.. In Lebanon, Daher argues, naming one massacre immediately summons another; one event enters a chain of rival histories through which every faction possesses its own chronology of injury and justification. Rather than reproduce that structure, she wanted to “strip violence down to violence” and return attention to what repeated catastrophe does to the people living through it.

The refusal to organize memory through political parties is not a retreat from politics. It is a refusal to let them remain its sole archivists. Then, throughout this densely human archive, Daher lets nature in.

The sea, trees, birds, and forests, they all initially function almost physically, giving us somewhere to breathe when Beirut becomes suffocating. Daher speaks of leaving the city for fresh air and of the sea as fundamental to how Beirut is experienced. But she also calls it a witness to time: a body that has received the city’s happiest moments alongside garbage, destruction, and even human remains. The image becomes difficult to shake.

Archives can burn. Buildings can disappear. Institutions can withhold material, and histories can be reordered according to whoever holds power. The sea has remained there through all of it. So have the trees and birds. Nature does not replace the archive in Do You Love Me It haunts its limits: a form of witnessing no one managed to catalogue completely.

And here lies perhaps the most interesting contradiction in Daher’s method. On screen she frees images from chronology, authorship, and hierarchy long enough for them to produce new relationships. Outside the screen, she does the meticulous work of the archivist to the fullest. The project’s website identifies and indexes the material behind the film, while Daher describes preservation itself as something that cannot stop at digitization and storage.

“Preserving archives is not just digitizing them and hiding them in a closed room,” she says. Preservation means allowing them “to have a new life through their reuse.” The seeming chaos of Do You Love Me, then, is not a rejection of archival responsibility. It is made possible by it. Daher preserves provenance while refusing obedience. She knows where an image came from and still claims the freedom to make it speak to another image it was never supposed to meet. That is the film’s creative disorder. And it is also why the title begins to feel like something constantly travelling between Beirut and the person watching.

Through cinema, music, family tapes, streets, wars, parties, ruins, trees and the sea, Beirut seems to keep presenting itself to the viewer and asking the question again. Do you love me like this too? After another destruction? Without the postcard? In the latest version of my ruin? For Lebanese audiences, the question can travel back in the opposite direction. Do you love me after making me live through all of this?

Daher says her priority was never to give viewers Lebanon through dates, geography or a definitive political explanation. “It was the emotional experience as a Lebanese [person].” That is ultimately what her archive preserves most powerfully. Not simply what Beirut looked like. What it has felt like to love it.

Lana Daher’s ‘Do You Love Me’ is an Invitation to Disturb the Archive

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Lana Daher’s ‘Do You Love Me’ is an Invitation to Disturb the Archive

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