My Father and Qaddafi is, on the surface, a daughter’s search for a man she barely remembers. But director Jihan’s documentary is far more than an act of remembrance; it is an excavation: of a father, of a country, of a century of wounds that refuse to close. In her quiet, unflinching way, Jihan makes a promise in the opening frames: that her father, Mansur Rashid Kikhia, will not disappear a second time.
Kikhia’s biography could have easily overwhelmed the film. He was Libya’s foreign minister, ambassador to the United Nations, and later the peaceful opposition leader who defected from Qaddafi’s brutalizing regime.
A “rising star” tipped by many as a possible future leader, he vanished from a Cairo hotel in 1993. Nineteen years later, after a search that became a life’s work, his wife Baha Al Omary learned his body had been found in a freezer near Qaddafi’s palace. These devastating facts could have encouraged polemic.
What Jihan chooses instead is restraint. The film’s strength is its impressive detachment, a clarity that never dulls the tenderness. When Jihan admits she has no memory of her father, she offers a single, tactile shard: “I remember his heartbeat,” she says, recalling her small self against his chest. In one image, the entire project is made human-sized.
Jihan goes looking for the man behind the myth, guided by an intimate family anecdote – her grandfather’s counsel to Kikhia be decisive, to do a thing fully or not at all. It’s a minor story of her father refusing to greet his grandpa’s friends in shorts that ripples into something larger: integrity as habit, conviction as character, not performance.
The film suggests that hundreds like Mansur were killed, men who made similar choices, whose families never got to name their dead. By keeping her father human, Jihan makes space for all those unnamed lives. Death, she understands, is a cruel player; closure is a privilege many never receive.
What lifts My Father and Qaddafi from personal elegy to essential cinema is the way it threads one life through the history of a region. The film’s political intelligence is quietly bracing.
We move from the Italian colonial concentration camps, where over 160,000 Libyans perished—to the fevered years of Arab nationalism, and the moment when Qaddafi, hailed by some as the next great Arab hero, consolidated power with ruthless skill.
In the film’s most troubling revelation, we glimpse how the CIA quietly tipped off Qaddafi about coup attempts, a reminder that the choreography of power is often set offstage. The question the film returns to, again and again: who is the villain in a story whose authors include empire, autocracy and an international order that washes its hands after lighting the fuse?
Jihan refuses the easy framing that blames “national incompetence” for state collapse while absolving foreign interference of consequence. After Qaddafi, the disintegration of Libya is charted without sensationalism – a slow unraveling that reveals a familiar geopolitical pattern. New powers emerge, new deals are struck, new pockets fatten; ordinary people pay.
The film doesn’t rant; it accumulates. A document here, an archive there, a conversation with a former official who, in the presence of this daughter and her camera, realizes he is speaking not just to history but to the future. The cumulative effect is a lesson delivered with humility and force: things do not simply fall apart; they are pushed.
At the center of this unfolding is Baha Al Omary, Jihan’s mother—a Syrian artist whose endurance steadies the film. She is the one who kept asking, calling, knocking, not just as a wife but as a witness.
There is a chilling sequence — told with a devastating calm — in which she meets Qaddafi himself. She knows he is lying; he knows that she knows. The dance of power and grief is condensed into a single exchange of eyes, a mother testing the limits of the dictator’s performance of benevolence.
The film shines here, letting Baha’s strength radiate without gilding it. She raised four children (two with Mansur), ferried them between the United States and France, and somehow protected the ordinary moments—laughter, teasing, meals—that give the documentary its meditative warmth.
Formally, My Father and Qaddafi is built with patience. Cinematographers Micah Walker and Mike McLaughlin capture rooms where light settles like dust; editors Alessandro Dordoni, Chloë Lambourne, and Nicole Hálová find a rhythm that lets the grief exhale.
Family candor—home footage, awkward smiles, small jokes—sits beside the dry authority of the historical record, and the juxtaposition never feels forced. The film is contemplative rather than declarative; it watches emotion unfold rather than insisting we feel a certain way. In doing so, it earns what it asks of us: to stay, to listen, to hold.
It is also a film about silence—what disappears when a father vanishes: the lessons never taught, the arguments never had, the permission to be shaped by someone’s flaws as much as their virtues.
Jihan names the urgency: in the noise of Libya’s chaos, her Libyan identity risks being buried. The documentary becomes her way to unearth it, to plant a seed of connection so that what was lost does not vanish from memory—hers, or her country’s. That she was born in exile, raised in Paris, trained in human rights and storytelling, matters; the film bears the marks of someone who knows both the coldness of institutions and the heat of intimate grief.
There is a final grace note in the film’s reception and support—the path it took through major labs and funds, from Sundance Institute’s Documentary Program to IDA and Hot Docs–Blue Ice, to its world premiere in Venice. But the laurels feel secondary here.
My Father and Qaddafi is an act of repair more than recognition, a daughter’s wager that telling the truth—fragmented, tender, incomplete—is better than letting absence harden into myth. It is a love letter, yes, but also a mirror held up to a century of erasures.
Jihan keeps her promise. She does not let her father disappear.
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