In less than two centuries, politics and global demography have been remodeled by nationalism/racism -- with the help of war, famine, pestilence and disease. Unprecedented massive displacements, immigration, deracination, crises and loss of cultural identities -- indeed, the disappearance of entire cultures and languages -- discrimination, assimilation and holocausts of various stripes have reshaped the geopolitical landscape. Here and now, in this country and others, how common it is to find households of grandparents who speak the Old Country language, parents who speak the old and the new, and grandchildren comfortable only in that of the adopted land.

In Forget Baghdad, writer-director Samir takes as starting point his own growing up in Switzerland, the child of an immigrant Iraqi Communist. On a Zurich-to-Israel flight, he muses about the fates of four of his father's companions, Jewish Communists who were stripped of citizenship and also literally deported by a repressive régime "not the Baghdad of The Thief of Bagdad," to settle as "Oriental" Arab-Jews in the western, Ashkenazi (European)-dominated State of Israel.

Only one of them, it develops, is still a Party member, and they have prospered materially -- three as writers (Shimon Ballas, Samir Naqqash, Sami Michael), one (Moussa Houri) as "Father Fruit Juice" of a thriving kiosk -- but their culture is still Arabic, which carries as high a price in beleaguered Israel as in exclusivist Switzerland.

Balancing, and contrasted to the four as they speak in subtitled Arabic in modern Haifa and Tel Aviv apartments, is English-speaking Dr. Ella Habiba Shohat, an Iraqi-Israeli in Brooklyn since the early '80s, cinema scholar and professor of Cultural and Women's Studies at CUNY.

Interspersed with American, Israeli and Egyptian feature clips, archival footage, propagandistic newsreels and personal snapshots, the four seventyish men discuss politics, social theory, writing and racism in their birth and adopted homelands. Appearing but slightly at first, however, it is the fifth interviewee, younger and the only female, who brings it all together. Commenting astutely on Jewish (and Arab) stereotypes in Exodus (whitewashed blonde), Lawrence of Arabia (desert fighter Arab), True Lies (dogged terrorist) and "Boureka" comedies like Israel's first, 1964 Oscar nominee, Sallah Shabati, Ms. Shohat runs a tape of her TV appearance that shook Israel, the talk show in which conservative "arrogant host" Gabby was overwhelmed by live audience support for her thesis of racism in that land of Sabras, milk and honey.

Though once-unsubsidized pita bread is now popular and a Black Panther "Arab Jew" advocacy movement has arisen, the picture that emerges is one of continuing pressure for the sizable Sephardi, or Mizrahi, population to abandon its culture, language and customs in reaching Golda Meir's "appropriate level of civilization." As a "slimy Iraqi the best you can get is be asgan, vice president," although in the pecking order, Iraqi Jews themselves complain about more recent coreligionists from Afghanistan.

With concentration on the last sixty, a history of three thousand years is difficult to lay out, and while some facets inevitably remain confused -- Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's 1941 putsch, the Nazi presence, the Communists' and Britain's exact rôles -- the film does manage an acceptable grasp of complicated, unfamiliar affairs. It dillydallies around, however, runs in too many directions, before cutting to the grain; not until Shohat's cogent exegesis, and that after she has already appeared a few times, does it all pull together and stop circling.

Part of the fault lies in the arrangement and cinematography. Done partly with a small amateur DV camera but also in "eight types of recording and media formats," the images are unwisely framed. Leaving aside an intrusive hand with paper numbers that pops up here and there, far too many annoying typed headings and inconsistently employed margins, a major distraction is the use of half-screen, i.e., on some theory that since Arabic goes right to left and English vice versa, speakers ought to be to the left or right with (not always related) images, or simply undefined black, filling the other half.

With better editing and less repetition -- several of the interviews and repeated cinema sequences -- Forget Baghdad would be more effective. It introduces a seldom-discussed theme important for an understanding of that most volatile area of the world. Unfortunately, this point is clearly made only in the last twenty minutes. That fact should be an indication of what needs to be reshaped and tightened.

(Released by Eurozoom; not rated by MPAA.)