Do You Love Me

Beirut is under bombardment. There is nothing new about this story. Lana Daher’s non-fiction film is a cultural-historical self-portrait, comprised entirely of film clips (many of them from dramatic features, but also from news reports, TV and home video) culled from the last 70 years. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory. It is a love letter to Beirut, marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss.

Exhilarating! As freewheeling as a travelogue, Lana Daher’s mercurial documentary eschews talking heads and voiceover, drawing instead from more than 20,000 hours of archival footage to channel the resilient spirit of Beirut. Though composed of a huge volume of material, Daher’s documentary does not overwhelm, maintaining instead a remarkable rhythm that fluidly moves between calm, exuberance and disorder. Initially spurred by the erasure of Lebanon’s contemporary history in the country’s education system, [it] shows an alternative way of narrativising the past – one that moves away from the rigid confines of institutional models.

The Guardian