Do You Love Me

“In Lebanon, contemporary history is not taught in schools.” So proclaims the opening title card in Do You Love Me, multidisciplinary artist Lana Daher’s assemblage-style documentary, which premiered as a Venice Days special event. In the absence of a centralized national audiovisual archive, Daher works from a trove of sources—including fiction films, documentaries, newsreels, art installations, home movies, television shows, still photographs, and pop songs—as rich and variegated as the pluralistic nation’s history (among the notable works included are films by Jocelyne Saab and ND/NF alum Nadine Labaki). Moving fluidly across time and between genres, the associative editing, reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, weaves together the political and the ephemeral. Images of war—the long-roiling civil war, the current Israeli bombardment—give way to images of weddings in a reverie that doubles as a statement of hard-won national pride. To accompany the film, Daher has created a website, doyouloveme.film, which serves as an annotated index of her sources. An Icarus Films release.