The Long Journey Home

Tracing its roots to the Babylonian exile, Iraq’s Jewish community—the world’s oldest—numbered 180,000 at its peak in the 1940s. By the 2000s, it had completely vanished. Culminating twenty years of research, The Long Journey Home is a landmark documentary uncovering this dramatic rise and tragic fall. From the community’s Golden Age and the brutal WWII Farhud pogrom to the mass exodus, Israeli transit camps (Ma’abarot), and final dissolution in Baghdad, the film weaves rare archival footage with intimate interviews, including the director’s father. The result is a groundbreaking, emotional cinematic chronicle of displacement, identity, and memory.