The Culturist Film Club x Jameel Arts Centre on August 1: Do You Love Me
Jameel’s Summer Cinema programme, in collaboration with The Culturist Film Club
Film 4 of 5:
I first watched Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me in Venice last September. A film about collective memory told through Lebanon’s history in cinema and pop culture. It was a crowd pleaser in Venice, and it has been shown are many more film festivals since then, and I’m looking forward to watching it again, and discussing it.
DO YOU LOVE ME
Lana Daher, 2025, 76 min
Do You Love Me is a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, 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.
“…a meditation on what it means to remember in a country without a shared account of its recent past, where contemporary history is rarely taught, and collective memory remains fragmented and unresolved.” — Sarah Khalil, The New Arab
The screening will be followed by a discussion with writer and curator Yalda Bishdari.
Date and time: August 1, 19:30-21:30
Venue: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (location map)
Free to attend, please register here.
Director’s Bio:
Lana Daher is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. With a background in filmmaking (MA, Goldsmiths, University of London) as well as fine arts & graphic design (BFA, American University of Beirut), she has long been active in Beirut’s vibrant art and music scenes, working across sound, image, and archival practices. Her work is grounded in deep research and intuitive storytelling, exploring the space between documentary and fiction by bringing different time periods and emotional landscapes into dialogue.
Do You Love Me, her debut feature had its world premiere in 2025 at Giornate degli Autori, an independent sidebar of the Venice International Film Festival. Alongside the film, she created a website, a curated index of the resources and materials behind the project, aimed at reconnecting Lebanese film heritage with both local and wider audiences. An IDFAcademy alumna, Lana also co-produced the film through her company, My Little Films, founded in 2024.
Speaker’s Bio:
Yalda Bidshahri is an Iranian writer and curator based in the United Arab Emirates. She creates communal spaces of imagination and freedom through exhibitions, programmes and texts developed in close collaboration with artists and practitioners across disciplines. Her work is shaped by a commitment to practices that challenge systems of oppression and foreground liberating ways of seeing, feeling and being. In 2024, she curated In your dreams at Bayt AlMamzar, Dubai. Her writing has appeared in publications including Frieze, ArtReview Asia, ArtAsiaPacific and Canvas. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
Links to the rest of the screenings:
Jameel’s Summer Cinema 2026: in collaboration with The Culturist Film Club
August 15 — The Blazing Sun