Documentary film „Do You Love Me“by Lebanese director Lana Daher will be screened in the feature-length documentary competition at the 27th Mediterranean Film Festival in Široki Brijeg, which will be held from September 23rd to 26th. The film is a kind of a love letter to Beirut, but also a personal journey through seven decades of Lebanese history, composed entirely of archival footage – films, television segments, home videos, photographs, and music.

“Do You Love Me” began in 2018 as a research project about the relationship between war and music: how music carries memory, moves through conflict and acquires new meanings over time. It initially focused on the Bendaly family, whose song gives the film its title. Gradually, however, I realised that what mattered to me was more personal. My relationship to Beirut, my childhood, my own traumas, and our collective relationship to memory and history. At its core, the film came from a need to show what life in Lebanon actually feels like when you are shaped by constant crisis, and how that reality affects identity, memory and emotion across generations. I wanted to capture not only historical events, but also the contradictions, humour, tenderness and vitality of people living in a country marked by so much violence and instability. It is very much born from my personal experience of my life in Beirut. 

It revealed how deeply our generation is shaped by a history that has never been properly taught or collectively processed. Lebanon has no unified national archive and no single, shared historical narrative. Our relationship to the past is therefore made up of fragments: family stories, photographs, films, music, silences, and memories that are often contradictory. I also came to understand how generational the tension is between wanting to leave and being unable to detach. Many of us grew up with the idea that leaving was both inevitable and impossible. We were encouraged to imagine our futures elsewhere, while remaining emotionally attached to a place that continually challenges, disappoints, and shapes us. That attachment is not only geographical. The repetition of themes in Lebanese cinema reflects the fact that so many of these questions remain unresolved. Trauma is inherited through silence as much as through speech, and the film does not try to resolve that - It tries to remain with its complexity.

I have been moved by the way international audiences connect with the film, even when they know very little about Lebanon. I have never been interested in explaining the country through a conventional historical narrative or offering a single political message. I wanted to create an emotional experience that could resonate beyond the particularities of Beirut and give the audience a sense of this place's energy. The film is rooted in Lebanon, but it explores more universal experiences: memory, loss, identity, attachment, displacement, and the difficulty of living with unresolved histories. Viewers may not recognise every image or historical reference, but they can still connect with the emotional experience of struggling with home or trying to reconstruct a past from fragments. Some people leave the film feeling lighter; others leave feeling sadder, confronting the possibility of being born into war and dying in war. Both responses are meaningful to me. I hope audiences see Lebanon not only as a country defined by conflict, but as a place full of stories, humour, creativity and tenderness.

The responses are very personal and varied. Lebanese audiences bring their own memories, political positions, family histories, and experiences of displacement to the film. The same image can mean something entirely different to different people. Some viewers recognise a Beirut they knew or thought they had lost. Others encounter memories they would rather not revisit. Because the film is made from Lebanese people speaking about themselves, through the eyes and voices of filmmakers, artists, civilians and families, it can feel intimate even when the precise source of an image is unfamiliar. The Lebanese premiere took place during the war, which made the experience particularly intense. At one screening, I realised that the sound of an Israeli drone had become part of the film’s soundscape. It was very meta. It made clear that the film was not simply looking at the past; the past was continuing to enter the present.

The film has inevitably changed in meaning because the reality around it has changed. Diving into the archive meant confronting a history that is not properly taught and that we do not fully have access to. It also revealed the repetition of our cycles. We are living through another war in Lebanon, and I think our deepest problem is not only external aggression, but also the fragmentation within our own society. I have stopped trying to explain Lebanon rationally or conventionally. Instead, I have learned to accept it in its full, unresolved complexity. Working with the archive gave me a strange kind of temporal distance. Not to escape what was happening, but to process it.  I hope the film reminds people that Lebanon is not simply another “war country,” where death becomes a statistic. Lebanese people have stories, humour, desire, and tenderness. They are full of life, and that humanity deserves to be seen. If the film can function as an unofficial, incomplete but living national archive, one that holds space for our memory, identity, feelings, then that feels meaningful to me 

It comes partly from necessity. Beirut has always required people to improvise, adapt and create forms of life in the midst of instability. But I do not want to romanticise this. The fact that people continue to create does not mean that the conditions are acceptable, or that we are reconciled with the status quo. The city’s energy comes from artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers and ordinary people who continue to create and live here. Much of the archive reflects this. What survives has often been preserved not by official bodies, but by individuals and families, frequently women, who kept photographs, home movies, recordings and personal documents. Beirut’s creativity is therefore inseparable from its wounds. It exists alongside grief, anger, humour and desire. The city continually reinvents itself because its people refuse to be reduced to what has happened to them. But that’s life, that is hope, isn’t it? Do we have any other choice? 

The website extends the film’s exploration of memory in another form. Creating the archive was also important because Lebanon does not have a unified national archive. I researched approximately 20,000 archival elements, including photographs, films, home videos, journalistic footage, music videos, podcasts, radio recordings, and abandoned collections. More than half of the film comes from independent Lebanese cinema, including material from around 106 feature films. Only about 7% of what I researched made it into the final film, and we negotiated close to 400 rights contracts. The website makes the material used in the film visible. It reconnects audiences with many of the filmmakers, artists, musicians, photographers, families, and institutions that helped write and preserve Lebanon’s audiovisual history. 

The film is a reflection of the present. It uses the past to reflect on the present. The situation in Lebanon is extremely fragile and unstable. It also asks what it means to love and live in a home that is so complicated. How to deal with these repeated cycles of violence, wounds, and disappointments, and how do they shape us, our memories, and our identity? I do not think the film offers a single answer. My own relationship with Beirut remains contradictory. It is a city I love, but also one that continues to challenge me. Working on the film allowed me to stop trying to explain, escape, or idealise it. Working on the film allowed me to accept it for what it is and not for what I want it to be. That shift allowed grief and affection to coexist without demanding resolution. Ultimately, the film intended to remain present with that complexity and to insist that the life, humanity, and tenderness of its people are seen.