The project took nearly nine years. “It was more life than anything else,” she explains. “COVID lockdowns, the research, speaking to more than sixty people. It felt like doing a PhD.” Her conversations spanned diplomats, dissidents, extended family and older Libyans who lived through decades of political repression. Some welcomed her warmly, while others withdrew the moment they heard her last name. The fear that shaped her father’s generation was still alive.
The visual backbone of the film comes from the archive she assembled with determination. Jihan tracked down United Nations archival recordings, material from Italian and British production houses, and rare footage from the Qaddafi era, gathering fragments scattered across multiple countries and decades. She catalogued, labeled, and organized this material herself before bringing it to her editors. Instead of treating these images as courtroom evidence, she uses them as emotional and historical texture — glimpses of the world that shaped her father, and the world that erased him. The archive provides context without drowning the viewer in analysis; it lets the political remain visible while keeping the focus on the human story.
Yet the film is anchored above all in the personal. “To heal, you need strength,” she says. Making the film allowed her to find some of that strength. “I realized I wasn’t just receiving information. It was an exchange. I had something to offer too.” Healing, for her, was not a dramatic transformation but a gradual shift — a slow, patient movement toward empathy and toward her father as a human being rather than a distant symbol.
One of the quiet anchors of the film is her mother, the Syrian-American artist Baha Al Omari. She raised her children almost entirely on her own while fighting publicly and privately for answers across Egypt, Libya, and the United States. “My mother held a space for joy and normalcy,” the filmmaker shares. “We were witnessing her fight for my father, but she protected us.” Their home was deeply Syrian in its rhythm: the food, the dialect, the humor, the music and poetry. While Syria shaped her everyday life, Libya existed in the silence around her.
It’s this absence that gives the film its emotional pulse. As Jihan searches for her father, she is also searching for Libya — a country she inherited but did not grow up inside. “I spent nine years discovering more about my father’s country,” she says. “And discovering myself in the process.” The film becomes a parallel journey: reconstructing a parent and reconstructing a homeland.
Identity, for her, is something fluid. “I struggle with labels. They flatten things,” she says when asked if she identifies as Arab. She acknowledges the term, but also the multiplicity within Libya — indigenous, Arab, Mediterranean — and her own upbringing in the West. What binds her is not a category but affection. “My connection to Libya and Syria comes from love. The land, the trees, the sea, the people. My sadness is that I cannot access these places freely because of turmoil.”
Another thread in the film comes from her reflections on how Libya’s earliest genocide, and much of its political memory, survived through women’s oral poetry. “I was cut off from Libya,” she says. “I didn’t have a generation to speak to me. So in a way, I’m talking to myself. And if people find value in that, then maybe I’m repairing that broken bridge.” The bridge she evokes is generational: women who carried memory through voice, and the daughter who inherited only fragments.
Her interviews with older Libyans deepen this idea. She searched their faces for traces of her father, hoping for a gesture, a sentence, a detail that might unlock something she never had the chance to know. “I kept waiting for someone to say something that would suddenly make me understand my father and Libya,” she says. “But it never happened. It isn’t magic.”
When the film premiered in Venice — the first Libyan film there in thirteen years — the response was unexpectedly intimate, especially from Italians confronting their colonial history. The MENA premiere in Doha carried a different resonance: a return to the region, a continuation of a story long withheld from public memory. Her parents met through activism for Palestine, and she sees today’s political moment as one where these histories are finally being understood as connected.
What makes My Father and Qaddafi powerful is not the scale of its political backdrop but the intimacy of its gaze. Jihan is not seeking closure— politics denied that possibility long ago. Instead, she offers something gentler: a daughter sitting with the pieces of a life interrupted and choosing to rebuild them.
“At its core,” she says, “the film is a love letter. To a father. To a country that was about to disappear from memory.”
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