Interview: Jihan K. – My Father and Qaddafi

Selected Out of Competition for the Venice Film Festival, My Father and Qaddafi digs into repressed memories, collective feelings and brick by brick forging over a lifetime. An excavation of memory, identity, and national amnesia, what Jihan K does here is move well beyond home videos and fragmentary recollections — making the personal essay docu into and an exploration of a collective history. A private family search that gradually revealed itself as a blueprint for understanding a nation’s forgotten past, in the spirit of films like Bye Bye Tiberias and The Mother of All Lies, Jihan constructs her story to prevent true loss. In it we discover Mansur Rashid Kikhia, a former Foreign Minister of Libya, UN ambassador, and ultimately a leading voice in the peaceful opposition to Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship. We also come to understand the perfect storm that saw Gaddafi seize power and never let go. The act of remembering and reclaiming is incredibly powerful here. At the 2025 Doha Film Festival, I got to sit with the filmmaker and discuss what a decade in the making looks like – about finding the eventual blueprint, the edit and what has been the reaction from fellow Libyan exiles.