57.1%
Every time I am asked, “How is Lebanon?” I feel the weight of the situation. In recounting it, I realize the kinds of levers we rely on to make what has happened to us bearable. Through self-reflection on both a personal and collective level, I try to understand how it is possible to live several lives at once, without ever truly living the life that peace promises us: the one shaped by hope and dreams.
In her documentary “Do You Love Me,” which premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and went on to win the Helsinki Documentary Film Festival award, along with two honorable mentions at other festivals, Lana Daher takes viewers on a journey through the last seventy years of Lebanon. Using images and sounds—and drawing from over twenty thousand archival sources, including films, personal family recordings, and private and public photographs—she examines the Lebanese collective psyche. Through the eyes of individuals, directors, and artists, Daher reconstructs the city before us.
A still from "Do You Love Me"
Feeling relatively safe during the ten-day ceasefire, I headed to the Metropolis Cinema Association, about two and a half kilometers from my home, to watch the film, being exclusively screened there. Just days earlier, Israel had launched around one hundred rocket strikes on Lebanon within ten minutes, targeting much of Beirut. Even though we knew the ceasefire was being violated on Lebanese territory, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.
In my subconscious, the fragments of all the wars I have lived through merge with the heartwarming moments shown on the screen. Among the most deeply moving was the story of a young woman recalling the 1975–1990 war. She described how, at night, as they slept in the building’s shelter, she would match her breathing to her grandmother’s, convinced that if her grandmother’s breath stopped, so would her own. Equally significant is the story told by an old man whose life was saved by one of his students. Stationed at a checkpoint, the student ran toward the gunmen at the last second, shouting, “Don’t shoot—he is my teacher.”
Illustration by: Tamar Gurjian
During the ten-day ceasefire, I attended two other special screenings at the same theater, both presented exclusively by the Metropolis Cinema Association. These were two plays by the renowned leftist artist Ziad Rahbani, who passed away far too soon in July 2025: Bil Nisbe La Boukra Shou? (What About Tomorrow?) and Film Ameriki Tawil (Long American Movie), originally staged in 1978 and 1980. Both are set during the Lebanese war. The first tells the story of a married couple who leave their village for the city in search of a better life and end up working in a bar—a microcosm of society where workers endure hardship and humiliation just to survive. The second takes place in a psychiatric hospital in Beirut and explores the country’s condition through dark humor.
Even though fifty years have passed since these plays, their topic and dialogue still feel strikingly current, as though nothing has changed in Lebanon.
When I visited warsinlebanon.com to calculate how much of my life had been consumed by war, the number stunned me: 57.1 percent. More than half of my existence has been spent navigating an ocean of violence. But numbers alone cannot convey the true weight of that reality. They cannot explain how my grandparents and parents survived the 1915 and the 1975, or how any of us continue to wake each morning in a country where survival has become an art form. Perhaps that is the answer I have been searching for. When someone asks me, "How is Lebanon?" I can no longer separate catastrophe from resilience. We do not live despite the weight—we live within it, carrying our history not as a burden to cast off, but as a strange and difficult inheritance.
