‘My Father and Qaddafi’ Venice Review: A Personal Quest Amid a Nation’s Turmoil

Private and public life intertwine seamlessly in My Father and Qaddafi, a deeply personal documentary by Libyan filmmaker Jihan K. The film delves into her country’s complicated history while focusing on the enduring mystery surrounding the disappearance of her father, diplomat Mansur Rashid Kikhia. In 1993, Mansur traveled to Cairo and was never seen again, in an incident clearly connected to Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorial regime — a government he had once served before becoming a prominent opposition figure.

Jihan was very young when her father was likely assassinated and barely knew him. Through conversations with her mother, older brother, several relatives, friends, and politicians who knew Mansur during those years, she gradually reconstructs not only a portrait of her father but also the fraught political context in which he lived. These interviews also illuminate the family’s struggle to find him and the extraordinary efforts of her mother in the aftermath. Archival footage and personal videos showing Mansur at work as a career diplomat — navigating a complex relationship with Qaddafi’s regime — are invaluable to the film.

The documentary moves back and forth in time, but at its core it patiently recounts Libya’s tumultuous twentieth-century history: the massacres under Italian colonial rule, successive governments, and the arrival of a young, seemingly promising Qaddafi in 1969. Within this political climate, Mansur joined the government, eventually serving as Foreign Minister and ambassador to the United Nations. By the 1980s, however, he resigned in protest over the regime’s human rights abuses and quickly became a visible opposition figure, living in exile in the United States.

In the U.S., Mansur met Baha, the visual artist who would become Jihan’s mother. They married and had two children. During a trip to Cairo, Mansur vanished without a trace. From the United States, Jihan’s mother launched an international search and advocacy campaign. Although it involved many unusual encounters, it ultimately failed: not only did her husband remained missing, but she never discovered clearly what had happened to him. The film explores this journey, interweaving it with Jihan’s current family life and reflections on Libya after Qaddafi’s fall during the Arab Spring of 2011.

By telling her personal story, Jihan weaves in the narrative of her country and of countless others who experienced similar fates. The film highlights how the hopeful, progressive waves of the 1950s and 1960s in these nations gradually vanished, leaving an enduring social tragedy. Even with its limitations and conventionalities, My Father and Qaddafi provides a precise analysis of how a nation’s political life can penetrate and shape the life of a single family.

While Jihan admits she did not know her father well enough to form a deep emotional connection — a gap acknowledged in the film — avoiding excessive family melodrama allows her to contextualize Mansur as a man of integrity: a humanist, committed to his country and region’s future, who ultimately fell victim to one of the most brutal dictators in the region.