Do You Love Me | WATCH DOCS

This cinematic love letter to Beirut dotes on a city with a history made up almost entirely of unexpected twists and turns. Lana Daher’s film, skillfully assembled from thousands of archival fragments of fiction, documentaries, and amateur footage, is an extraordinary feast of style, action, and pop-culture references. For years, Lebanon’s capital has been both a symbol of glamour and of political instability, concentrating the region’s tensions like a lens. Beirut means decades of simmering civil war, bankers and refugees, and religious militias. It is where Europe meets Asia, and where great wealth collides with human suffering. Dynamic, stylish sequences portray a city where life has always moved fast, and often ended young. Fragments from cult films and documentaries (including “I Want to See” starring Catherine Deneuve, the origin of one of the WATCH DOCS section titles) reveal how, as culture evolved, violence gradually came to dominate the entire region. 

Konrad Wirkowski