MongoDB using an OR clause in mongoengine

MongoEngine docs say otherwise. Please check this:

The mongoengine documentation is apparently incorrect in this case. Instead of using the bitwise operators "&" and "|", you should use the standard operators "and" and "or".

So your first query becomes:

query = ContentItem.objects.filter( (Q(account=account) and Q(public=True)) or  (Q(account=account) and Q(creator=logged_in_user)) ).order_by('-last_used')