Lana Daher's 'Do You Love Me' Reassembles Lebanon's Cultural Memory Through Found Footage
The Beirut-based artist's debut feature premieres at Venice Days and opens at Metrograph in New York, weaving 70 years of archival material into a 76-minute portrait of Lebanese history.
Shortfundly Desk · New York ·
Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Lana Daher makes her feature debut with Do You Love Me, a kaleidoscopic work assembled from seven decades of found footage, independent cinema clips, newsreels, and home movies. The 76-minute film juxtaposes scenes from action movies with archival documentation of violence on Beirut's streets, creating collisions between past and present that recontextualize the country's cultural memory.
The film premiered at Venice Days, the independent sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, before opening at Metrograph in New York. Daher's approach stitches together disparate time periods and visual registers, allowing Lebanon's cinematic history and lived reality to speak across generations through montage.
As a Beirut-based artist working across disciplines, Daher draws on extensive archival research to construct a visceral portrait that resists linear narrative. The film's distribution path from festival premiere to New York arthouse exhibition marks the international arrival of a significant new voice in Lebanese cinema.
This brief draws on reporting from Filmmaker Magazine.
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