It's surprising that that didn't work.  Did it just return no results or did it error?  When I'm debugging elasticsearch queries, I'll often put a print statement in the es_query function [right at the bottom](https://github.com/dimagi/commcare-hq/blob/master/corehq/elastic.py#L193), something like
```
import json
print es_url
print json.dumps(q, indent=4)
```
This will give you the exact query sent to elasticsearch, along with the index used.  Then it's often easier to iterate using a tool for interacting directly with elasticsearch, such as [Marvel](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/marvel/current/#_sense) or [ElasticHQ](http://www.elastichq.org/).  I'd recommend pasting the query in there, and tweaking with it, removing filters, etcetera to find out specifically what is causing the problem.

I can better help you figure this out if you send over the whole query, such as that printed out by `print json.dumps(q, indent=4)` above.