Synopsis/Details
THE FORGOTTEN opens in Tijuana, where sixteen-year-old MARIA LOPEZ and her best friend LUPE slip away at night to join a group of migrants being smuggled into the United States through a tunnel beneath an old church. Maria dreams of a modeling career; Lupe dreams of everything America promises. Maria's father, PABLO LOPEZ — a former Tijuana police officer who lost his badge for refusing to take bribes, and who now earns money in brutal underground fights — wakes to find his daughter gone, leaving only a letter. A widower who has already buried his wife, Pablo will not bury his daughter too. He digs up a hidden cache of weapons from his wife's grave, extracts the smugglers' route from a complicit priest, and follows Maria through the same tunnel.
On the other side, the girls fall into the hands of MR. CHEN, a polished Los Angeles "benefactor" who survived a horrific childhood passage from China in a cargo container — an ordeal that taught him people are merely cargo with a price. Chen installs Maria and Lupe in a Hollywood Hills mansion run by NADIA, a Russian madam, where the girls are pampered, made over, and dressed in designer clothes, never suspecting that the lavish party thrown in their honor is an inspection — and that the diamond pendants around their necks mark them as inventory for an international auction of human beings.
When Maria's instincts tell her something is wrong, she flees into the Hollywood night, only to be lured into a far more immediate horror by a gang of snuff filmmakers — and "rescued" by Chen himself, who returns his investment to a cage to await sale. Meanwhile Pablo, posing as a migrant, tracks Chen through sweatshops and crack houses, surviving betrayal, torture, and electrocution before turning the tables with the grenade he smuggled in. Bloodied and outnumbered, he storms the warehouse auction in a ferocious one-man assault to reach his daughter's cage.
Gravely wounded, Pablo defeats Chen in a final hand-to-hand battle, sparing the trafficker's life only when the LAPD arrives and a fellow father — the DETECTIVE leading the raid — promises that Maria will be safe and Chen will answer for his crimes. The story closes years later in a citizenship ceremony, where Maria and Lupe, now legal Americans, recite the Pledge of Allegiance — liberty and justice finally theirs, purchased at the highest price a father could pay.
