‘My Father and Qaddafi’ Review: Jihan K Crafts a Moving Portrait of Living Under a Regime of Brutality [A-] Venice
Life doesn’t always give us answers – but that doesn’t mean the questions always linger, haunting us at every turn. There is a pain in knowing and not knowing, in getting the answers we always feared but also in never getting the answers we’ve always yearned for. As the pain grows, it accompanies us, inhibits us and we learn how to live with it – like an unwanted guest that just wouldn’t leave, nor is it possible for us to part ways with it. After all, there is nowhere else to go.
With My Father and Qaddafi, a feature-length documentary screening out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Libyan filmmaker Jihan K has crafted one of the most moving documentaries of the year and certainly one of the best Middle Eastern documentaries in quite some time. By deciding to finally share her story with the world, the filmmaker’s feature is a remarkable testament on cinema’s ability to help us heal. For storytellers, sharing their stories – and wounds – with the world means the pain is no longer confined in their minds and souls. For viewers, witnessing those truths deepens our sense of humanity, as we get to see how common experiences shapes us as humans and how pain, no matter how excruciating it might be, reminds us of what it’s like to be alive.
In My Father and Qaddafi, Jihan K tells the story of the father she never knew. Early on as she narrates her story, she reflects on how she has to rely on others’ memories to form a picture of her father in her mind. Having disappeared from her life in her early childhood, the filmmaker’s only way of preserving his memory, for herself first and foremost, is to make this film. She embarks on a quest to find answers, but also to find closure. With a mix of family tapes, archival footage, interviews with people who knew him, and her own observations, she crafts a picture of who the man was, what’s it like to grow up grasping for memories of an absent father and how it’s like to be constantly haunted by shadows of the past.
Her father is Mansour El Kikhia and he certainly was no ordinary man – he was one of the very few Libyan politicians who had left their mark on the global stage. A fierce advocate for humans rights and one of the most prominent and outspoken voices of opposition to the Qaddafi regime, Al Kikhia had long fought for justice and his fight against Qaddafi’s regime ended tragically – except that his whereabouts were never revealed except 18 years after his disappearance. In the final week of November 1993, the politician was kidnapped from a humans rights conference in Cairo, Egypt, only to be never seen again until the 2011 revolution which ousted Qaddafi. It was only then that it was revealed he had been killed by the regime in the year 2000, and his body remained in a freezer for 12 years in one of Qaddafi’s sons farms.
Between 1993 and 2011, El Kikhia’s family endured the unimaginable – living without ever knowing what truly had happened to their father. In early scenes, the filmmaker shows us family tapes in which the ghost of her missing father is such a looming presence that refuses to leave. Those tapes, mixed with TV interviews and rare archival footage of El Kikhia, give us a sense of what it was like for the family, particularly the children, to understand that their lives ahead will always be marked by that absence, and while they may never get the answers they need, they grow to understand that to live is to keep questioning.
Jihan K is a both the daughter and the filmmaker, but it’s the daughter, more than the filmmaker, who is making this film. The doc is intentionally intimate, never aiming to be grandly cinematic and relies almost entirely on personal footage from those agonizing years of absence as well as recent visits Jihan K had made to Cairo and Libya alongside a shattering voice-over by the filmmaker as she sorts through the footage and retraces her father on the screen as though she is reshaping her memory of him with us in real time. With this approach, the filmmaking style mirrors the film’s purpose: collecting visual fragments of a vanished man to try to create – and preserve – a personal memory.
But that’s not to say the film solely focuses on restructuring the filmmaker’s memory of her father. It rather paints a picture of a mysterious country, one that has rarely been seen on film. With the exception of recent scenes of war, nothing much is known about Libya, especially on film as the country has almost no cinematic history. Following independence from Italian and British occupations, the Qaddafi regime stifled any attempts to modernize the country, rendering it as a secretive place, isolated from the rest of the world. International dialogue was almost non-existent, western ideologies were considered incriminating and radicalization of the population was in full speed thanks to Qaddafi’s ideologies that were shoved down people’s throats in schools, on the airwaves and in every aspect of public life. The film disrupts that silence, showing us never-before-seen footage of life in Libya over the years, the ever-growing fear of speaking out or against the regime, and how its downfall didn’t really save the country. Radicalization speaks louder than guns, and its long-lasing impact lingers even after tyrants are forcibly removed from their blood-stained thrones.
The power of My Father and Qaddafi remains in the intimate and extremely moving portrait of the missing father and not the politician. It reminds us how the fight for truth may cost us a lifetime – but it’s always worth it. We may spend our lives trying to recollect a memory that’s been brutally taken away from us, chasing a presence that’s been stolen from us, a voice that’s been silenced merely because of uttering the truth. But in dedicating our lives to reclaim those hijacked memories, we get to spare the next generations the pain of never knowing and the agony of voicing questions only to hear their echoes in the void. And that’s where the power of cinema truly lies.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.
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