Do You Love Me

A tour-de-force of images, sounds, music and moods, Lana Daher’s extraordinary documentary about Beirut is a compendium of sights and sounds willfully out of control. For those who have visited the city and know some of the basics about its history and politics, Do You Love Me offers a way into its mysterious non-stop imagery, which cascades on and off the screen far faster than it can be assimilated. Other audiences beware: this is not an easy film to watch cold. It bowed in the Venice sidebar Giornate degli Autori and made its Jordanian premiere at the Amman Intl. Film Festival.

The opening titles issue a clear warning: the editing of the film is deliberately disorienting. This doesn’t let editor and co-screenwriter Qutaiba Barhamji off the hook, but it does put the viewer in a defensive position toward what is to come. Over 70 years of movies and TV shows, photos and home videos flash by at breakneck speed. There are no sequences or obvious themes to group the images and make sense of them. Some seems to repeat later in the film, others don’t.

Daher and her producers are said to have researched 20,000 archive documents and signed hundreds of copyright agreements to use this material. The point is made that Lebanon has no national archive. The point is also made that it is wrong to end a war and start over, pretending it never happened. Accountability is essential. Perhaps that is the underlying thread that runs through this fascinating, bewildering jungle.

There is violence, there are guns and car bombs, buildings collapsing into rubble. There is tragedy. And yet, for a film so full of things, Do You Love Me is strangely empty of emotion. It is as though the unending flux of images is only capable of accumulation, leaving no time for emotional engagement. Perhaps there are isolated moments that touch the heart – a boy on the boardwalk missing a leg; a white horse shot down on the street. In a moment they are gone, and the memory fades.

This ambitious film of fragments, flowing back and forth in time, is worth re-watching. It is Daher’s first feature documentary. Qutaiba Barhamji is the editor of Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters and The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Director: Lana Daher
Screenwriters: Lana Daher, Qutaiba Barhamji
Producers: Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Lana Daher
Editing: Qutaiba Barhamji
Sound: Pierrre Armand
Production companies: Films de Force Majeure, My Little FilmsWorld sales: Lightdox
Venue: Amman Film Festival (Arab Feature Documentary Competition)
In Arabic, French
75 minutes