Do You Love Me

A love letter to Beirut written in VHS static and 8mm grain. Far beyond the scope of an official state archive, or what can be captured by the colonial gaze, Lana Daher offers an alternative history of Lebanon by drawing on a vast collection of audiovisual fragments. Composed entirely of 70 years of stolen and salvaged footage–home movies that bleed into bombings, wedding tapes cut with newsreels, pop songs scored over checkpoints–Daher provides no prescriptive narrative line. Instead, Do You Love Me is a sensory tour-de-force that asks: what happens when a people without an archive remember together? (Bethan Hughes)