Kan Fee, Rah
2025
75 cm x 3.5 mm
Photography, table, wall, glass
This project brings together two distinct yet intertwined gazes, those of filmmaker Lana Daher and editor Qutaiba Barhamji, to explore how memory lingers in place. The work extends from their collaboration on Daher’s feature film Do You Love Me (2025), a cinematic journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory composed entirely of archival materials: moving images, stills, and sound. For this photographic installation, Daher and Barhamji create a palimpsest of time, where past and present coexist and overlap. Daher revisits the film’s emotional landscape through her own family photographs: vivid colored images mainly from the 1980s and 1990s that were featured in the film. They are fragments of joy, intimacy, childhood, and everyday life, marked by both warmth and unease. In dialogue with these personal archives are Barhamji’s recent photographs of Beirut. Together, they retraced key locations from the film, which he captured on handmade black-and-white film. These contemporary images reveal spaces that still bear the weight of history, suspended between disappearance and survival. Though taken in 2025, they seem to belong to another time: raw, grainy, and restless, as if the city itself were caught between eras. Placed side by side, the two collections merge into a single body of work. A conversation between the image that remembers and the image that seeks to remember. Together, they suggest that memory is not linear but a process of cueng, layering, and reassembling. Past and present fold into one another, creating a quiet tension: the past is not behind us; it lives within spaces and images. Time is felt emotionally rather than chronologically. Even without knowledge of the film, the installation opens a space where absence and presence, tenderness and loss coexist, where the viewer can sense how memory continues to shape what remains.
Lana Daher is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Beirut. With a background in fine arts and graphic design (BFA, American University of Beirut) as well as filmmaking (MA, Goldsmiths, University of London), 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 is her debut feature. Alongside the film, she created a website (www.doyouloveme.film), a curated index of the resources and materials behind the project, aimed at reconnecHng Lebanese film heritage with both local and wider audiences.
Qutaiba Barhamji, born in Damascus, Qutaiba Barhamji is a director and film editor. He has edited more than sixty films in twenty-two languages, including The Voice of Hinda Rajab (Silver Lion, Venice 2025) and Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa, Official Competition Cannes, Oscars 2023) by Kaouther Ben Hania, Do You Love Me (Venice 2025) by Lana Daher, as well as Smoke Sauna Sisterhood by Anna Hints (Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, Best Direction at Sundance 2023). He also edited How to Save a Dead Friend (Cannes 2022), Litle Palestine, Diary of a Siege (Cannes 2021), and Still Recording (Grand Prize, CriHcs’ Week, Venice 2018). As a director, he is the author of Gevar’s Land (2020, SCAM Star 2022, Cinéma du Réel, IDFA) and the short film Wardé (Arte, 2016).