“Love Letter to Beirut”: Lana Daher talks about sifting through 20,000 sources and 70 years of films to produce “Do You Love Me” | film

AAt one point in Lana Daher’s film Do You Love Me, a woman questions the repeated advice of those around her to simply forget about Lebanon’s 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Why does she insist on “digging into the past,” especially since “this war was no worse than the others”? However, it is precisely her act of remembering—knowing that she had “not dreamed” the reality of war—that prompts her to excavate “in the present.”

The Lebanese director’s debut feature film is in itself a substantial feat of exploration, as more than 20,000 sources were consulted in collaboration with editor Qutaiba Barhamji (who worked on Hind Ragab’s voice), to uncover the footage that would produce this 76-minute film. It is also objective in the sense that this work was done in relation to a country that does not have a national archive.

This fact – along with the film’s opening statement that contemporary history is not taught in Lebanese schools – does not come as a surprise when viewed in the context of the broader region. The Palestine Film Unit, which began as a small filmmaking group in the late 1960s and played a founding role in Palestinian national cinema, had its archives removed by the Israeli army during the 1982 Siege of Beirut. In a similar manner, US forces confiscated the Iraqi state archives following the US-led occupation of the country in 2003.

Beyond war, restrictions on freedom of expression by post-colonial states also play their role in cultural erasure. In another scene from “Do You Love Me,” two women sift through newspapers and point out sections obscured by the heavy hand of censorship — even the Prime Minister’s column is not immune.

“Archives are curated all over the world,” said Elham Shakrivar, a BAFTA-nominated producer and curator who focuses on films from the region. “They are selective, and they are also imaginative. Access to them is selective. Sometimes, it depends on whether you can afford access to that archive or not.”

So, when archives of Arab cinema suddenly resurface, or in the case of Mustafa Darqawi’s banned 1974 film, “On Some Meaningless Events,” being found 42 years later as a film negative in Barcelona, ​​the rediscovery can be as disconcerting as it is miraculous. The state may be an unreliable narrator, but memories of the past remain common among those who lived through historical events – and are more real to it.

“In a place like Lebanon, where the government lets you down time and time again, it’s journalists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who document history,” says Daher, who first began working on the film in 2018.

Since 2018, Lebanon has had to endure a lot of history. That year, the country held general elections five years after they were scheduled to take place. By October 2019, popular discontent had erupted into widespread protests that posed a serious challenge to the post-civil war order.

The prime minister resigned, but the ruling coalition, including Hezbollah and other parties allied with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, continued to function regardless of the Beirut port disaster in August 2020. It is difficult to overstate the psychological, let alone physical, impact that one of the world’s most powerful non-nuclear explosions has had on a population already affected by the Covid pandemic.

In perhaps the film’s most serious scene, Daher addresses this “huge rupture in all of our lives,” but she admits that the toll of the event caused her to reevaluate the purpose of the project and “that was a moment where I wasn’t sure anymore.”

A presidential vacuum followed, and subsequent parliamentary elections in 2022 produced inconclusive results: Lebanon was in limbo, within a region embroiled in overlapping and unresolved conflicts. “It was very difficult, because when we started editing the film, the war in Gaza had just begun,” says Daher. “Little by little, things started to get much worse in Lebanon.”

In October 2024, Israeli soldiers crossed the Blue Line again into southern Lebanon – having previously invaded in 1978, before occupying parts of the country from 1982 until 2000 – and launched a bombing campaign targeting mostly areas populated largely by Shiite Muslims, such as the suburb of southern Beirut.

“I thought about August 4th [the Beirut port explosion] “It was the most painful thing until I experienced the explosion of 80 tons of bunker buster bombs in the suburb,” says Daher. “As you know, my grandmother lives in the suburb. I am from southern Lebanon, so my experience with all of that was very difficult.”

The effect of “a lot of tension and violence” leaves its mark on cinema and on the tolerance of Arab audiences towards Arab films. “The last thing you want is that reality, even in the movie theater,” and so Daher’s mission was “to approach things in a light way… [and] Have a little humor at some points.”

“The Lebanese don’t need a history lesson,” she insists, though the film doesn’t shy away from addressing “the cycles of violence and the repetitions in these cycles of violence — the repetitions in history — and how these things kind of affect our psyche and our society, not who did what and when things happened.”

Rather than a strict linear chronology, Do You Love Me gravitates toward certain themes as they resurface in Lebanese archival narratives over the past seventy years. Images of the sea are everywhere, as are the scenes of joy that can be found in videos of wedding celebrations and siblings messing around with family video cameras.

Researching the project also led Daher on a long journey through private collections and abandoned archives, through universities and government radio. “I went to a lot of different places… It was like visiting a garage sale or a Sunday market; you’re looking through random boxes, opening drawers, and things aren’t sorted.”

For an essay film of this nature, the intellectual property rights barrier required a certain degree of creativity, with Daher going so far as to enlist her mother in a search along the Beirut Corniche to obtain copyright permission from a lone fisherman, whose eloquent comments in a 2020 documentary were deemed irreplaceable.

The film’s title is named after a song by the Bandali family – a musical band of siblings that became famous in the Arab world in the late 1970s – which Daher remembers from her childhood. This was an unusual point of reference in Lebanon in the 1990s, where the cultural diet was “American and French television… and it was all foreign cinema,” and the Arabic language was seen as “not cool.”

Later, “Daher became interested, and I suddenly wanted to speak Arabic… [but] Lebanese cinema was not available to me because a lot of it was either not digital or…there was only a little of it on DVD.

Much of Do You Love Me is composed of scenes from previous Lebanese films, thus showcasing the country’s cinema – including the work of pioneering female filmmakers such as Jocelyn Saab and Heini Srour – while also reworking traditional narratives in her own image. “Taking that and creating our representation through these hundreds of other representations, for me, the look of that was very important as well…making the film also changed my relationship with Beirut and my relationship with the homeland,” says Daher.

“Lebanon may not have a national archive, but there is something incredible about the way Beirut in particular lives,” Chakrivar concludes of the film. [also] The country was archived through cinema. It’s a love letter to Beirut, but I think it’s also a love letter to the idea of ​​cultural work that comes from a place of care and a place of love.