Unlike her mother and siblings, Jihan K never knew her father. She was six when Mansur Rashid Kikhia – human rights lawyer, Libya’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations – disappeared. A threat to Libya’s then-leader Colonel Qaddafi, Mansur went missing while attending a human rights conference in Cairo in 1993. Nineteen years later, in 2012, his body was discovered in a freezer in Tripoli, close to Qaddafi’s palace.
In her film, sold by Cairo-based MAD World, Jihan sets out to rediscover her father, to get to know him, and in the process understand the country he loved and served. His legacy gave her unique access to key political figures from that generation – Libyan former government officials and opposition members. “The film is a tool to make something concrete out of my father, to create a portrait of my father. It was a frame,” she tells Business Doc Europe.
It is also a story that she had to discover on her own. Back in Libya, there was a “black hole of information,” she says. “I just thought, I have to have enough courage to try, because what I can’t do is wait for the story to fall into my lap, to wait for the truth to come to me on a silver platter. I know that it’s something that I have to try to seek out, and make sense of myself.”
Core to the film is Jihan’s mother, the Syrian-American artist Baha Al Omary, who refused to end the search for her missing husband. Such is the importance of Baha’s role, the film’s title could have been augmented to include her, I suggest.
“Anybody who appreciates my mother immediately has access to my heart as well,” Jihan responds. “My mother is an unquestionable hero in the film and in my life…I’m inspired by her as a human being. And I just feel really lucky that I was under her care and protection at such a fragile point in my life.”
“She lost her brother to politics,” Jihan adds. “She grew up with her father in and out of prison and was almost killed several times throughout her childhood. She grew up watching her mother cook for her father every Tuesday a meal and took all the little kids, including her, to give it to her father [in jail]. She was also victimised by changes of governments, revolutions, wars, and as we know, the troubles of the Middle East…And then her husband was kidnapped, tortured and killed as a human rights lawyer.”
“I think what’s really magnetic and almost addictive about my mother is that she just has this really clear conviction. I think for human beings, you know, we’re in a muddled world. Everything’s in the grey. There’s a lot of suffering. It’s really easy to get down and hurt. But it’s really inspiring to see human beings that just stand for one thing, and it’s super clear to them,” she adds of her mother’s indefatigable sense of purpose.
At one point in the film, we are told that Baha even confronted Qaddafi himself about the husband that she dreams is still alive. Qaddafi told her that Mansur was indeed still living, but qualified his answer: “You asked me in the dream. I’m answering you in the dream.”
A very poignant moment in Jihan’s documentary is when her brother Rashid tells of touching the body of their father before his eventual funeral. “Closure is not to be underestimated,” Rashid says of the experience. Nevertheless, closure was not something Jihan could ever experience. Even then, she was denied final access to her father.
“I would rate that as the one of the highest points of frustration and pain in my life, for sure,” she tells BDE. “The fact that my father’s body was miraculously found, that it was frozen, that it was oddly preserved all this time so it could not have even been more identifiable. And then I missed him a second [time] as a 25-year-old adult for some obscure, arbitrary reason.”
“I was blocked because I was a woman, but it was also the chaos of the funeral. That was a second chance that I had to reconnect in my own way. Whatever would have happened would have been mine to have, but I didn’t get that chance. And yes, that is a very strange point of frustration I have in my life, but I also want to say that the bar of feeling true, hard pain in my life or suffering connected to my father, is so high.”
My Father and Qaddafi is Jihan’s debut film, whose rawness in style mirrors the fragmented nature of her odyssey to discover and understand her father.
“The last thing I wanted to do was come at people with a crew when I’m first introducing myself. These are people who don’t know me, and I have to gain their trust,” she says of her iPhone interviews within folks’ own environments. “When I was choosing footage, I never chose because of the aesthetics. I just thought that’s what it is. If it’s going to look like a mishmash, it’s because my life is a mishmash and there was nothing curated or clean about this process. It was messy.”
The historical and emotional importance of the content she was gathering may have trumped stylistic considerations, nevertheless we are continually aware of Jihan’s inherent sense of artistry and musicality, and those of her mother and siblings. Much of the film’s gentle soundtrack is provided by her half-sister Bisan Toron. “My entire family helped me make this film,” Jihan underlines.
As she was making My Father and Qaddafi, Jihan was also retelling the story of modern Libya, she underlines. “Objectively on the political scale – social, cultural, geopolitical – there’s a lot to learn about Libya…I’m learning this as a Libyan, so that must mean [audiences] most likely have something to learn too.”
“When I started with my father’s case, I approached it like a child. My father was kidnapped. Why? Because Qaddafi took him. Why? Very simple. Why? Why? Why? The next thing you know you’re in the Italian occupation and the [Libyan] genocide. Then you’re trying to learn about Mussolini and Italian fascism. My grandfather was imprisoned because of, and under, Italian occupation,” Jihan says of her country’s many interconnected histories. “I have never been informed or had any kind of enlightenment about my father’s culture through others…It’s like it slipped through the cracks of culture. It’s not very well documented. It was hidden away by 42 years of oppression by Qaddafi.”
The film therefore has enormous educational value – as well as considerable Impact potential. When Jihan was growing up, her missing father was always the focus of human rights campaigns. “Our living room would get flooded by letters from Amnesty International, and families and caring people all over the world. And so the human rights element to my father’s case is very obvious. I always imagine [the film] being shared with human rights organisations, helping with campaigns for people with enforced disappearance to see how these cases do happen and also how they affect the families left behind.”
“My father loved Libya, he was very loyal to it. And he was loyal to his people. He came from a sincere place,” Jihan sums up Mansur Rashid Kikhia’s legacy. “And so my film is also an extension, not only in honouring him – it’s my little act of justice for my father – but to continue that love for his country, which is a seamless fusion of the personal and political.”
