Do You Love Me is Lana Daher’s film about Beirut that weaves through over half a century of found footage, home movies and both established and lesser-known archives to tell the story of a city, a home, a memory and the lives of many. The film explores memory in its cultural, societal and personal forms, using decades of footage to craft a haunting portrait of the city. Its May release follows its Berlin premiere at the ALFILM Festival, and the film arrives with striking resonance. We caught up with Daher to discuss her life, work and the journey that was creating this remarkable film.
What was the impetus for making Do You Love Me? Was it always the plan to use archival footage?
I find that our experience as Lebanese people is extremely unique and extremely challenging.
In Lebanon, we don’t have a unified history book that’s taught in schools, so there was a desire to investigate the environment that I grew up and lived in to understand the past a little bit more. We don’t have a national archive. There was this desire to create something that could attempt to fill some of that space, in whatever capacity. And yes, making the entire film only from archives is one of the very few things that was clear from the start, even when the film was not yet about the themes that it’s about. When I first started working on it, I was interested in the Lebanese musical dynasty, the Bandaly Family, and I thought that I was working on the relationship between war and music more than I was. Once I started researching and going a bit deeper, I realised that the themes I was interested in were actually much more related to me and my experiences growing up in Beirut. It became more about memory and how we remember, about childhood trauma, all these kinds of things, so I moved away from solely focusing on Bandalys. I started building this story from different sounds and images.
How long did this excavating process take? I would love to hear about both the practical and the poetics of this project.
You’re right, it was an excavation in the end, in a more abstract sense. It was an internal excavation for me. On an external level, it was a very long, slow excavation. I started working on the film in 2018. I got my first funding at the beginning of 2019: the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize at Berlinale. From then, it was a very long, slow process. Firstly, because things were insane in Lebanon. In 2019, there was an economic collapse. In 2020, there was the port explosion. So every year, every few months, something happened in my environment that was just so difficult. And then there was Covid, so spaces were blocked. In Lebanon, we have some private institutions that have extremely organised archives, but that’s not where I was getting all the material. I was going to individual people or to abandoned archives and literally searching through things to find what I wanted, but also to figure out what was there. A big part of the initial process was just figuring out what archives there are in Lebanon. Where are they? How can I access them? Who will let me in? Who won’t? What periods do they cover? While doing that, I realised that I didn’t want to just focus on the Civil War or on a specific period. I didn’t want to have a Western point of view. I wanted very local archives that were created by people who are living here – by the Lebanese, by people from here. There are a few parts with input from foreigners, but these are foreigners who really spent a lot of time in Lebanon in very difficult conditions. So that was sort of a process for finding the content for the film and also for finding the point of view of the film.
Where are you from in Lebanon? Did this play a role in how you selected people and places from the archives?
I’m from the south of Lebanon. Both of my parents are from the south of Lebanon, actually from two of the most destroyed cities – not just from previous wars, but more specifically from the last two wars. Both of these cities are in the part of the south of Lebanon that Israel is currently attempting to invade. My dad’s city is very close to the border and my mom’s cities are Sur, Tyre and Nabatieh. I’m very, very connected to the south of Lebanon but was actually raised, grew up in and went to school and university in Beirut. My entire life has been in Beirut. The film is very Lebanese, but it’s very, very Beirut-centric, and that’s something that people pick up on a lot. They notice these sorts of repetitions of spaces, like the sea, coming back. There are also a lot of female characters in the film. There’s this sense of women bearing witness to time and to cycles of violence, but also of women being in a position of having to receive, process and figure out where to go from there. There’s definitely a very strong female character in the film. That’s something that I wanted, but it’s not something that I was trying to force. What’s also really interesting is that there are a lot of Lebanese women filmmakers featured. That’s something I only discovered properly in my research – the presence of women filmmakers: older ones like Jocelyne Saab, Randa Chahal Sabag and Heiny Srour, but also much newer ones, like Nadine Labaki, who’s an extremely well-known actress and a director, or Danielle Arbid.
Did you discover any of these filmmakers for the first time through the project?
Absolutely. Danielle Arbid watched the film in Paris. She really enjoyed it. A couple of them are coming next week to see it. Of course, I’d already asked these filmmakers long before whether I could use their sound and image, but it’s been special to share the entire film with them. I felt that it was very important for me to witness the city and travel through the cinema of Lebanon through their eyes as much as through my own. What’s so special about the film is that it’s completely made from archives, and almost half of those archives are Lebanese cinema from the late 50s up until today. I found it fascinating because there’s my experience as a filmmaker, as a woman, as a Lebanese person who’s lived in Beirut my entire life, trying to tell my story, but at the same time, I’m choosing to do it through the representation of the city and the country through the eyes of filmmakers. The layers of representation between what I’m seeing and what I’m choosing to show, but also what these filmmakers have expressed, start to become very blurred.
Did you find any connections between these filmmakers and their work?
There’s this sense of women bearing witness to time and to cycles of violence, but also of women being in a position of having to receive, process and figure out where to go from there.
I found connections between the filmmakers, between the singers, between the photographers. The connections I found were the repetition of questions, a search for answers and a desire to understand: that binds all of their work together. At first, I was a little bit harsh or judgemental to myself. I asked myself, “Why am I repeating their questions?” But those aren’t questions I was repeating because I was watching their films, they were questions that I was repeating because they were the same questions that I had. I realised that there are so many issues that, up until today, are still unresolved for us as Lebanese people, both within our society and within our identity. The reason why these thematics are repeated is not because we’re not creative. You look at us today and it’s fucking nuts. I started this film in 2018. I have gone through so many wars – so many wars and horrific things during them. And then the film is finished and a few months later, I’m sitting here in Beirut, thinking, “Here we are again.” It’s really insane. It brings a different relevance and meaning to the film.
I was thinking that while watching it.
Yeah, it’s crazy. I was supposed to have a premiere on April 4 and a release in Lebanon, and obviously that got cancelled because the cinema has no clue if it’s sustainable. I still decided to have this one screening if we’re all able to make it. We’re selling tickets at the door. I don’t know if there’s going to be four people or 400. I’m doing this because it feels like it’s so relevant and so important. I’m very excited about it.
I wanted to discuss the way the film was edited; there is a thematic linearity to it.
Qutaiba Barhamji is the editor of the film and he really, really understood where I was coming from and what I wanted. Together, we kind of started to put things together. What we [Qutaiba and I] had were loads of Adobe Premiere timelines. One had a music timeline, which was the history of Lebanese music from the 40s until today. One was a linear timeline of the wars, but very news orientated. I had timelines of all the films that I had researched and I had time-coded bits that were relevant. And then I had timelines that were thematic, so for example, conversations and audio under specific themes. I had something that was called ‘cats, rain, wind, inside to outside of a car’.
I was just thinking about women looking out of cars in the film…
Yes. I had sections like ‘people standing by a seat’, ‘people dancing’. Then I had literally like ‘massacres’, ‘children’, ‘babies’, you know, all these kinds of things. So when I went to Qutaiba, I had all that. At one point, Qutaiba suddenly was like, “We need something abstract and a bit, I don’t know, organic. Do you have flowers?” And I hadn’t researched like a single fucking flower. But then I remembered in my mind’s database that, “Oh, there are flowers in this film or that film.” So then we’d have to go back, scroll through the entire film to find flowers. In between the editing sessions, I would go back to Beirut and do another two or three months of readapting research for the next session. Qutaiba and I worked side by side. For me, he was a huge part of not just the editing, but also the writing; he’s also a co-writer. It was a very, very special, beautiful process.
We were literally side by side the entire time. Qutaiba asked me, “Do you want to make the film in Beirut, by the way?” I was living in Beirut, but he’s based in Paris. The plan was to potentially edit in Beirut, but every time we wanted to, something would happen. It was difficult for the production, and it’s hard because when you live here, your tolerance to danger, to crisis, to everything is very different than someone who doesn’t. So I couldn’t. And I’m happy that it went this way, that I edited in Paris, because it gave me distance and perspective. There were moments where I was in Beirut and there were missiles and bombs. It was very, very traumatic for me. Every time I would leave, it would also be a moment when I could feel a little bit safe, that my nervous system could settle and I could have perspective. We basically ended up approaching the writing of the film and the editing of the film as if it were a fiction film. We started to write a plot and a structure on note cards first. Every time we would edit something, it would completely shift, but we did try to have a beginning, middle and end: three acts, as if we were writing a fiction film.
What role did music play in the film?
Music was a huge part of the film. I used to DJ for many years and I love music. I just wanted to make a film that foreigners, whether or not they’ve been to Beirut, would be able to watch, connect to and understand: to understand the feeling of this place. I also wanted to make a film that Lebanese people would be able to watch and relate to. I really wanted music to be a big part of it, especially since you don’t have a voice or character in some of the scenes. The lyrics of the songs, for me, are very important. They’re subtitled and at points they have a strong social message. They very much interact with the images on the screen. It was like part of the script for me.
The release of the film intersects with current affairs that interlace your film’s content…
It’s crazy, you know. There was a screening in Paris over a week ago, and I had a Q&A session. I started by saying that it feels very, very sad, but also very surreal for me that the images of the film, which are technically all images of the past, speak to today, whether they’re images from the 70s, 80s, 90s or a year and a half ago. I just feel like they look exactly like what we’re going through once again, over and over and over again. That repetition is very scary, actually, and it’s very sad and it’s very difficult to accept. But it makes me feel how relevant the film is. It makes me want to share the film and talk about these things. I find that our experience as Lebanese people is extremely unique and extremely challenging. I think that it’s very difficult to be Lebanese. It’s very difficult to be from this place where you feel that there’s always something pulling at you, and someone attacking, and someone fighting. It’s extremely challenging to be from here. It’s challenging to live here. I think that what the Lebanese people have, which keeps them together, and what they share is their love for their country. That’s what keeps us here and also what keeps us coming back.
Do You Love Me? was shown on Apr 28 as part of ALFILM Festival and will be released on May 7 for screenings across select kinos.
