“The research and ability to stitch archive footage into a coherent story is impressive.”

What do you do when you need the collective memory of a nation to remember your father? And how do you piece together the influence of the man who removed your father from your life, but left no trace of him after his disappearance? These are the questions that documentarian Jihan K wrestles with in her debut My Father and Qaddafi, in which she tries to gain the full picture of her father, Mansur Rashid Kikhia, a former Foreign Minister of Libya and ambassador to the United Nations. Jihan knows very little of the man, as they were separated at such a young age that she barely remembers him. Through archive footage, home videos, and interviews with family and former inner circle members of Libya’s opposition, she unearths not only her father’s history, but the history of a nation, which was eradicated by a brutal dictatorship to the point that Libya’s collective memory held little from the time before it.

The dictatorship in question was of course that of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled the country with an iron fist for 42 years, from the end of the 1960s until his death during Libya’s civil war in 2011. After Gaddafi took power in a coup d’état in 1969, Kikhia became an important figure in his government, serving as Foreign Minister from 1972 to 1973. After a stint as UN ambassador, Kikhia resigned in 1980 to protest the brutalities of the Gaddafi regime, and went into exile in the United States. There he met Baha, a Syrian-American artist, and subsequently married her. The couple had two children together, the youngest of which was Jihan. When Jihan was six years old her father flew to Cairo to attend a convention. She never saw him again.

Her father mysteriously disappeared from a Cairo hotel on December 10, 1993, an incident that made international headlines. What exactly happened to him after that remains shrouded in mystery to this day, even after seeing My Father and Qaddafi. Whether he was dead or alive was unclear, and Baha moved heaven and earth to find out his fate and whereabouts; she even had a secret meeting with Gaddafi in the middle of the night somewhere in the Libyan desert, something that sounds straight out of a wild John le Carré novel. It wasn’t until after the Libyan civil war that Kikhia’s body was found, one of many bodies stuffed in a freezer in a villa belonging to Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief. Why? Nobody knows, and maybe it’s for the better.

If this sounds like an exposition dump, you’re not far off, as Jihan’s research is exhaustive. Yet it’s also necessary because besides not wanting her father to be forgotten, she also wants a whole nation to not forget its history and for herself to connect with her Libyan heritage. This is why a good part of My Father and Qaddafi is also dedicated to the few decades in Libya’s past that led to Gaddafi’s rise to power, starting from its time as an Italian colony, through a genocide and a brief period as a kingdom. Libya is not unique in this sort of post-colonial turmoil in the Arab world (look at Gaza alone), which, as the film shows, has been a major roadblock in establishing a pan-Arabic identity.

By being so exhaustive, the film’s personal connection to the subject matter is at times sadly lost. No matter how touching its final moment is, and no matter the poignancy of the narrative on a larger scale, the absence of a true bond between father and daughter can be felt. Personal moments are bittersweet, but never palpable outside the interview scenes with Baha, a willful and strong woman whose love for her husband can be heard in her words even decades after his death. With Jihan that connection is, understandably, missing, and when that is part of the premise of the film it’s a stumbling block. Fortunately her research and ability to stitch archive footage into a coherent story is impressive, and the interviews with her father’s peers fill in the blanks as to why Kakhia was such an important and much-needed figure in the Arab world, even if it veers into hagiography at times. Combined with the rich and interesting history of post-colonial Libya, however violent it was, these aspects make My Father and Qaddafi a worthwhile watch even if it doesn’t meet all its goals.