The Forgotten Kingdom

The Forgotten Kingdom is a family travelogue through an unraveling Mediterranean world at the turn of the 20th century, glimpsed in settings of Ottoman Sephardi women’s songs portraying the visceral, personal experience of family members and neighbors caught up in the upheaval of wars and migrations. 

 Acclaimed Ukrainian sand animation artist, Kseniya Simonova, crafts ephemeral flowing narratives for Guy Mendilow Ensemble’s storytelling and music. Mendilow’s cinematographic score radically reframes traditional Sephardic tunes and songs with elegant, multi-layered arrangements. The bittersweet rawness of Tango; the rhythmic fire of classical Arabic percussion; gorgeous vocal harmonies and other pan-cultural influences layer over the harmonic roots of Western classical music.

With lyrics in Ladino, an endangered blend of archaic Spanish, Turkish and Greek, and English narration, the show renders scenes of a culturally rich day-to-day Ottoman life from before WWI through the early 20th-century’s violent population displacement and tearing-apart of communities. These events resulted in population reductions of Ottoman Sephardi communities as high as 98%.

Simonova’s breathtaking landscapes of sand give a dreamlike, intensely emotional quality to the story. Characters move in and out of flowing landscapes, through coastal Mediterranean villages, Hungarian forests and ships setting out across the sea.

In an adventure that “explodes with artistry, refinement, and excitement,” (Hebrew Union College, OH) The Forgotten Kingdom moves audiences with questions about struggles we still face today.