Do You Love Me: Lana Daher's found-footage film explores decades of Beirut's memory and resilience

As images of Beirut accumulate in Do You Love Me, they do so without chronology or hierarchy, folding weddings into bombed streets, seaside afternoons into televised air raids, and moments of intimacy into scenes of rupture, until memory itself begins to feel like the organising principle rather than history.

What takes shape is not a record of events but an emotional landscape, formed through repetition and return, in which joy, endurance and violence sit alongside one another without resolution.

Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Lana Daher, the archival essay film draws on more than seven decades of Lebanese audiovisual material to build a nonlinear portrait of a city that has learned to live inside unfinished time.

Composed entirely of found footage from cinema, television, home videos, music, and photography, Do You Love Me avoids narration or explanation, allowing Beirut to surface through association, gesture, and accumulation rather than instruction.

Screening in London this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), the film arrives as a meditation on what it means to remember in a country without a shared account of its recent past, where contemporary history is rarely taught, and collective memory remains fragmented and unresolved.

Rather than reconstructing events, Daher reconstructs feeling, asking what it is like to live in a city where crises recur across generations without ever fully settling into the past.

From the outset, Daher was clear that the film could not be anchored in a singular voice or a first-person account, even though the emotions running through it are ones she recognises deeply.

"I was never interested in telling my own story in isolation," she tells The New Arab. "The experiences, fears and longings in the film are ones I recognise and have experienced intimately, but they are also shared, echoed and repeated across many lives."

Whenever a sequence began to feel too enclosed or confessional, she let it go, leaving space for personal memory to dissolve into a collective "we".

That choice shapes the film's rhythm, with scenes moving forwards and backwards across decades, mirroring a city where time rarely progresses cleanly and where unresolved crises return with altered faces but familiar weight. Rather than try to impose order on this instability, Do You Love Me accepts disorientation as part of living in Beirut, something to be experienced rather than corrected or explained away.

Working exclusively with archival material also reshaped Daher's own relationship to the city. When she began the project in 2018, Beirut still felt immediate and exhausting, unfolding in real time amid political upheaval and economic collapse, but immersion in decades of recorded memory forced a different kind of attention.

"Beirut became something I had to listen to rather than react to," she says, describing how the city gradually stopped being something to explain, escape or idealise, and instead revealed itself as an accumulation of gestures, voices and repetitions, where grief and affection could exist side by side without demanding resolution.

This balance between tenderness and brutality runs through the film's ethical approach, and although Do You Love Me is saturated with the violence of Lebanese life, it avoids graphic imagery, a restraint shaped through close collaboration with editor Qutaiba Barhamji and long conversations about what violence means and how it is measured across different lived experiences.

"The film does portray the violence of life in a city like Beirut without showing depictions of dead bodies," Daher explains, framing absence not as sanitisation but as care, and as a refusal to turn suffering into spectacle or something to be consumed.

Music plays a similarly deliberate role throughout the film, with Lebanese songs drifting through the images and carrying decades of emotional memory without tipping into nostalgia.

Daher selected tracks spanning more than sixty years, often using lyrics as a form of dialogue or commentary that replaces speech entirely, allowing melody and words to articulate what images alone cannot.

"The aim wasn't to evoke a longing for what was lost," she says, "but to sit with what remains."

Again and again, the film circles a familiar Lebanese tension, the desire to leave alongside the inability to detach, which Daher sees as deeply generational and shaped by growing up with the sense that departure was both inevitable and impossible.

Rather than resolving this contradiction, Do You Love Me accepts it as a condition that persists precisely because it has never been resolved, repeating across decades of cinema, music and recorded life.

Since its world premiere at Venice's Giornate degli Autori in 2025, Do You Love Me has travelled widely on the international festival circuit and attracted industry attention, but its power lies less in reach than in restraint, and in its insistence that Lebanon not be consumed as a case study or a crisis, but encountered through attention, duration and listening.

At the ICA, that invitation feels especially timely, as Do You Love Me offers neither answers nor closure but something more fragile and demanding, a shared act of listening that resists erasure without pretending to tie everything together, and that holds memory carefully while acknowledging it will always remain incomplete, returning again and again to the question that gives the film its name.

Do You Love Me screens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 5 to 19 February 2026, with screenings on 5 February (UK premiere followed by a Q&A with Lana Daher), 6 February, 7 February, 8 February, 10 February, 11 February, 12 February, 13 February, 15 February, 17 February, 18 February and 19 February. The film will also screen at Bertha DocHouse at Curzon Bloomsbury on 22 and 25 February.

Sarah Khalil is a senior journalist at The New Arab