‘My Father and Qaddafi’ Follows Jihan K’s Long Search for the Truth

At the Doha Film Festival, one of the standout regional premieres is “My Father and Qaddafi,” the debut feature from director Jihan K. Part personal excavation, part political reckoning, the documentary traces the life and disappearance of her father, Mansur Rashid Kikhia, a Libyan human rights lawyer, former foreign minister and U.N. ambassador who emerged as a key opponent to Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. When he vanished in Cairo in 1993, the absence reverberated through his family, through Libyan memory, and ultimately through a nation grappling with years of political upheaval.

For Jihan, who was six when her father disappeared, that silence became formative. The film, nearly a decade in the making, attempts to piece together his story through testimony, archives, and her own reckoning with identity. “I realized I did not want my father to disappear a second time,” she recalls. “The first time I was a child, helpless in a game I didn’t understand. Nineteen years later, I had context. I had agency. And I felt a huge responsibility to keep the memory of my father alive, and by extension the Libya he loved and fought for.”

The film begins with Jihan’s childhood in exile and unfolds across decades of political upheaval. Her mother, Baha Al Omary, a Syrian artist, fought publicly for answers while raising her children in an environment carefully buffered from uncertainty. “My mother held a space for joy and normalcy,” Jihan explains. “We were witnessing her fight for my father, but she protected us.”

Despite its sweeping political frame, “My Father and Qaddafi” is anchored in intimate storytelling, with home videos, interviews, and political archives giving the visual landscape. But for Jihan, weaving them together required trusting collaborators. “I’d never made a film before. I didn’t know story structure. So I hired editors who were better than me,” she notes, laughing. “What I learned is that if you start strong, with the core essence of the story, it gives you permission to start weaving. But I also had to hold myself back. As much as I love abstraction, I realized I had a human rights mission. I didn’t spend nine years just to talk about myself. I needed audiences to understand Libya’s history, and the context of my father’s politics.”

In a nation with little cinematic infrastructure, and a history ravaged by authoritarianism and war, Jihan’s undertaking became both personal and national. “I owed it to myself,” she states firmly. “I couldn’t wait for the world to tell me what it meant to be Libyan. The story that was handed to us, by the West, by Qaddafi, even within Libya, was flawed. This was my chance to carve through that and say, ‘No. I want my own interpretation. I’m entitled to that.’”

Her process involved speaking to more than 60 people, including family, friends, diplomats, elders, many from a passing generation, some who did not live to see the finished film. “I started out thinking I was only receiving information. But then I realized that I’m giving them something too. I’m like a daughter or granddaughter, using this film as a vessel to repair a bridge between generations,” she reflects. “This is my form of oral tradition.”

Ethical dilemmas inevitably came with the territory, but Jihan found clarity in discovering that, structurally, she was the film’s main character. “It terrified me. But it also gave me freedom. It’s my perspective, how I interpret my father, my mother, Qaddafi. I had strict principles: I didn’t want to appropriate Libya’s suffering. I wanted to state it as fact, not as a wound. I treated the audience as empathetic and intelligent.”

The film’s premiere in Venice proved unexpectedly cathartic. Italy, once the colonial power responsible for the massacre of Libyans in the early 20th century, embraced the film with notable openness. “It was a beautiful full-circle moment,” Jihan recalls again. “I didn’t even have to do anything. They spoke about their own brutality. There was generosity, a willingness to confront that history.”

Doha marks the film’s Middle East and North Africa premiere, a milestone Jihan describes as emotional and overdue. Supported by the Doha Film Institute, the film enters a landscape of young Arab filmmakers interrogating identity, belonging, and political inheritance. “Libya is still a mystery to itself,” she observes. “Qaddafi’s hijacking of our identity was deep. My film is one way of putting Libya back on the map, allowing people to connect with Libyans from a human place, separate from overwhelming politics.”

Pan-Arabism also threads quietly through the narrative. Her parents met through activism for Palestine. “The emotional intelligence around Palestine now is higher,” Jihan adds. “People can see how interconnected these struggles are. Libya, Palestine, all these forces — it’s one shared history.”

As she prepares for more festival screenings, one dream remains: showing the film to Libyans.