<em>My Father and Qaddafi</em>

In 1993, Mansur Rashid Kikhia disappeared while visiting Cairo. He represented Libyan opposition groups at a conference of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights. At the time, his daughter, Jihan, was six years old. She never saw him again, and even though she hardly remembers him, she misses her dad a lot.

This is the beginning of Jihan’s gripping story. Her father used to be Libya’s ambassador to the UN, and for a time he served as minister of foreign affairs. But in 1980 he defected, fled the country and became an important voice for democratic change in his homeland. Jihan is still convinced that Colonel Qaddafi made her father disappear because of his peaceful opposition to the dictator’s regime.

To witness the Libya we have lost

Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Jihan K.’s documentary My Father and Qaddafi has won several awards, and it is in contention for the Academy Awards in 2027, which is fully understandable, because it is a truly remarkable and highly personal film.

The story follows Baha al-Omary in her search for her husband. She is an artist, a Syrian with American citizenship and a remarkable woman in her own right.

«Before he left for Egypt in December 1993, I drove him to Orly Airport,» she tells. But before leaving their Paris home, they got a phone call. Baha answered the phone, and Abdallah Senussi, Qaddafi’s intelligence chief and brother-in-law, wanted to know if her husband was with her. At that moment she knew that something was wrong, and she asked him not to go. But he didn’t want to listen. «There are so many ways to die, but in the end, death is death,» he said.

Jihan K. went to Cairo, trying to trace her father’s steps. She spoke to an uncle who lives in the Egyptian capital, and his simple explanation is that death is closely connected to life in countries like Libya and Syria. Young people die, older people die, and in a disintegrating society under a cruel ruler, nobody has the time to notice or care.

Young people die, older people die, and in a disintegrating society under a cruel ruler, nobody has the time to notice or care.

She does not accept this harsh message

«I made this film because I do not want my father to disappear a second time,» she said when the film was released. «It is a small act of justice for him — a service to his memory and to his love for his country. Telling his untold story also means sharing an untold story of Libya, spanning nearly a century of Libyan history and politics. I chose to use historical archives because I believe it is important, for both global audiences and Libyans themselves, to witness the Libya we have lost. When my father disappeared in 1993, he was one of the most influential visionaries of his generation in the Arab world, and his voice was silenced. In light of today’s global conflicts, his absence is felt more than ever.»

Erasure of collective memory

Through her documentary, Jihan tries to give a deeper explanation than her uncle’s rather simplistic approach. She tells the story of Libya in the post-colonial era, about the hopes of pan-arabism that her parents grew up with in the early 1970s. She completes the narrative in a highly intelligent way by including old film clips of her father, giving his view on what went wrong.

«They did not inherit an organised country,» Mansur Rashid Kikhia gives as one of his explanations why the great optimism that Qaddafi brought with him when he took power in 1969 turned into a brutal and dictatorial disappointment.

What distinguishes My Father and Qaddafi from many documentaries about political violence is that its real subject is memory rather than evidence. Lacking personal memories of her father, Jihan is forced to reconstruct him through other people’s recollections, home movies, photographs, official archives and interviews.

This leads to one of the film’s central questions: Can you know someone entirely through other people’s memories? At the same time, the search for one man becomes a search for Libya itself. The dictatorship did not merely eliminate political opponents; it distorted the nation’s historical memory.

After Qaddafi’s fall in 2011, Mansur Rashid Kikhia’s remains were found in Libya in 2012, confirming that he had been murdered. Since his disappearance almost 20 years earlier, the regime had denied any knowledge about his whereabouts, and now the truth surfaced. But only to some extent, because in that long time span there will always be lots of holes and utter lack of knowledge, which in many ways is the essence of dictatorship and oppression.

«I was kind of prepared,» says Baha to the camera about the last hours with her husband. On the way to Orly Airport, she had a feeling what could be about to happen, and still she couldn’t really have grasped to what extent authoritarian regimes erase not only lives but also collective memory. This is what Jihan has tried to do with this outstanding documentary.