The Grand Illusion

Made in close collaboration with editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji (editor of Kaouther Ben Hania's Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize-winning THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB and the Oscar-nominated FOUR DAUGHTERS), DO YOU LOVE ME is director Lana Daher's love letter to Beirut; a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche – marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory.

In English and French & Arabic with English subtitles.

“As heartbreaking as it is celebratory, and as reflective as it is brimming with resistance.” Sarah Ward, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

Critic’s Pick! “Do You Love Me serves as a coming-to-terms and as a vibrant counternarrative to the numbing closed circuit of a Lebanon enduring attacks to this day, while asserting the right to an identity outside that context… It’s a delicately wrought and tonally complex airing of shared traumas that also breathes with a sense of community.” Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times