ENCOUNTERS 2026: My Father and Qaddafi

Every year since our founding in 2010, The Bioscope has proudly hosted screenings of The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival. Now celebrating its 28th year as a festival, Encounters returns to The Bioscope once again with screenings at The Bioscope from 5 - 14 June. Tickets are R90. 

SEE THE FULL BIOSCOPE ENCOUNTERS PROGRAM HERE.

My Father and Qaddafi (13PGV)

Dir. Jihan | Libya/United States | 2025 | 88 min.

When she was six years old, Jihan’s father flew to Cairo and never returned. Mansur Rashid Kikhia, Libya’s Foreign Minister, UN ambassador, and human rights lawyer, had defected from Qaddafi’s regime and entered a silence that would span decades. His absence becomes the centre of an intimate search, as Jihan pieces together fragments of a man she barely remembers through family archives, photographs, interviews, and memories of those closest to him. My Father and Qaddafi follows Jihan as she traces her father’s disappearance, shaped by her mother’s relentless pursuit of truth, an odyssey that once led her to confront Qaddafi himself. What begins as a private inquiry expands into a pursuit of justice and a reckoning with the forces that erased her family from public history. As personal memory collides with Libya’s fractured political past, the film becomes a process of reconstruction of a life obscured by power, exile, and violence. Through generational trauma and scattered recollection, Jihan confronts what remains when a father becomes myth, a homeland recedes into something unreachable, and history remains inescapable.