In Lebanon, an opening title tells us, “contemporary history is not taught in schools.”

Basically, a half century of intermittent bloody unrest has been erased. The endless Israeli incursions and invasions? The civil war Israel triggered with the refugee dislocations caused by its 1948 creation and its “preemptive” “Six Day War” against its Arab neighbors in 1967, a civil war Israel then took sides in, all of which repeatedly tore Lebanon apart and devastated and re-devastated its capital, Beiruit, aren’t spoken of.

But the people remember — via home movies and photographs and oral histories and news coverage and TV and cinema from Lebanon or set there — films starring Catherine Deneuve (“Je Vous Voir,” “I Want to See”) and others.

“Do You Love Me” is history and memory via montage, sn impressionistic cut and paste picture made from thousands of sources — songs, TV shows, home movies, archival news footage and films, a city seen then and barely glimpsed now.

Lebanese filmmaker Lana Daher accurately labels herself a “multidisciplinary” artist, and proves it with this work of memory and poetry, music and testimony.

As history, it’s a film that doesn’t break down the many eras of the seemingly endless conflict, which Israel and the Lebanese-born descendents of the Palestinian refugees Israel created over the past century renewed back in 2024. Taking its title and organizing principle from the mournful Lebanese pop hit “Do You Love Me,” Daher’s film washes over the viewer with snippets of fresh oral history, archival interviews, film dialogue and music giving us a taste of the place and a grim feel for all that it’s been through.

Montages capture the simmering violence of Beirut, the fixation on firearms that took hold of the culture and the Lebanese cinema when hostilities broke out in the former French colony in 1975.

But the locals dance. Families gather to decorate cars for weddings and celebrate such ceremonies, sit down for meals or venture to the beach in other home movie footage.

“In this life,” a title tells us, “our memories melt into the sea.”

Papering over that history, “Do You Love Me” implies, merely ensures its constant repetition. Newspapers publish stories with blank spaces where unpleasant truths, facts or opinions have been “censored” out.

There are no Truth and Reconciliation commissions here. Wrongdoers never admit and repent anything. There’s no dealing with the country’s dysfunctional neighbors. And the upshot?

“We don’t know who we are.”

Daher’s evocative documentary isn’t designed to change that, just to remind Lebanon, Beirut and the world of an erased past that cannot be recreated. No matter how many times they rebuild and welcome “war porn” tourists longing ruins of the post-colonial “Paris of the Middle East,” those tourists are lways disappointed. The past is bulldozed and bulldozed, buildings replaced, again and again, by people trying to forget what they need to remember.

Rating: unrated, some violent images

Credits: Directed by Lana Daher, scripted by Qutaiba Barhamji and Lana Daher. An Icarus Films release .

Running time: 1:16