Retracing the route that her father took after leaving Morocco and emigrating to Israel in 1965, Michale Boganim’s hybridized documentary “The Forgotten Ones” works as both a personal recovery of Boganim’s father’s life and a larger investigation into the mistreatment of Mizrahi Jews – families and their descendants who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East – at the hands of the Israeli government. Framed around the various stops that Boganim and her daughter visit – Yeruham, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Jerusalem, etc. – and the generations of Mizrahi’s that live there, “The Forgotten Ones” is a profoundly personal film that highlights a historical plight that has often been overlooked.
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At each of the cities that Boganim stops at she both contextualizes the historical migration of Mizrahi Jews to Israel – believing in the ideal ‘Promised Land’ – and the racial prejudices that they suffered upon arrival. Intermixed with these archival dives, Boganim interviews Mizrahi Jews about their current lives and remembrances of the turbulent ’60s and ’70s. Moving across generations, “The Promised Land” provides a snapshot of the ostracization and injustices suffered by the group – including segregation of children, forced kidnapping of infants, and relocation into so-called “development cities” that bordered the Negev desert.
While Boganim provides a compelling primer for the differences between the populations, and the historical discrimination against the Mizrahi Jews, “The Forgotten Ones’ ‘ is most affecting when it zooms into her personal life, and her reflections on her father’s politics. Perhaps most interesting is her father’s leadership in the Israeli Black Panthers – a militant movement modeled after the American Black Panthers that protested against the unfair, racialized treatment they received at the hands of Ashkenazis. Juxtaposed against these reflections are Boganim’s personal recollections of her father, told in voice-over as she travels with her daughter – a silent presence that reminds her of the trauma that is carried across generations.
Boganim’s approach both works with vignettes – with interviews of poets, lawyers, and activists along the way – and as a larger historical contextualization of the marginalized group. While “The Forgotten Ones” tries to give both these interests equal weight – and screen time – the film occasionally veers into abstraction, as Boganim’s voice-over narration sometimes sacrifices historical and cultural clarity for dreamy retrospection. Yet, as the film begins with Boganim invoking her father’s visage in her daughter, “The Forgotten Ones” is both attuned to her specific family’s plight, while also arguing that her father was just one of many that were mistreated.
While her father, eventually, gave up the cause, choosing exile in France, Boganim’s family serves as a metonym for larger conversations about the role of racism with the community, and how the lingering trauma of discrimination still plays out on newer generations who continually struggle to assert their own ethnic and religious heritage. When the road trip finally ends in Jerusalem, “The Forgotten Ones” has showcased how the so-called ‘Promised Land’ quickly became corrupted by political and social movements that sought to reject and other the Mizrahim – introducing and personifying a historical injustice in the process. [A-]
