Very cleverly done.
[The original documentary is no longer available but there's an Italian version here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV1OxJk_v3o ]
The year chosen for the day in Gaddafi's life (1996) is just 2 years after the year I spent working there in Tripoli.
Things were going on at the time which we (expats) were not aware of. Some days on arriving at the office (the Tripoli headquarters of a large oil company) there would be posters pinned up all around the building in large black Arabic writing). On asking what they said, I was told that they were instructions/orders from Gaddafi for every Libyan national to gather in what was then Green Square - not far from where we were, to listen to him 'speak to the people'. At 11 o'clock on those days there would be a mass exit of all the Libyan workers and the only people left would be us expats. They would be gone for about 2 hours, and on those days we were instructed we must not leave the building.
I don't know about all of them, but I did find out that on at least one of those occasions they had been summonsed to witness a public hanging in the square. In a 2-weeks out-of-date smuggled in American newspaper (due to the sanctions imposed at that time no English-speaking printed material was allowed in to the country, so when people went on leave we would smuggle back in magazines and newspapers to read and these would be circulated around the expats in our compound with a rota list. When you finished reading you would cross out your name and pass it on to someone else on the list). If you were found in possession of any English-speaking material at any of the many security checks on entering or exiting the country (travelling overland through Tunisia, as it was a no-fly zone and the airport was closed) it would be confiscated and destroyed. Whenever any of the expats was going on leave they would bring with them various letters to expats' families to post when they got to England and we would pass their address to our families and the dates they would be in England for the letters to be sent to their address to smuggle back in. If they posted a letter through the 'normal' postal service they had to be addressed to the company that we worked in, they would take anything from 3 weeks to 2 months to arrive(!) and IF/when they did arrive they would have been opened and heavily censored - big black markers streaked through whole paragraphs and sometimes big holes where sections had been cut out. Photographs sent would invariably be confiscated also, so there was really no point in using that 'postal service'; we had no choice but to go down the smuggling route.
A small few-lined column in this smuggled-in American newspaper said that just 2 weeks previous there had been an attempted coup against Gaddafi, led by his 'right-hand' military person (I forget the name) which had failed and all those involved had been publicly hanged in Green Square, Tripoli, as "an example and deterrent to anyone else attempting to plot against their leader".
How does a dictator live? What is daily life like for a monster in power? From when he wakes up to when he sleeps, what goes on in the life of someone who will decide the fate of millions of people? What are the mechanisms that lead an ambitious individual to a spiral of cruelty and excess?
"A Day in the life of a dictator" offers an immersion into the intimate life of the most emblematic dictators of the 20th century during the bloody period of their reign: Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin Dada and Muammar Gaddafi.
[The original documentary is no longer available but there's an Italian version here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV1OxJk_v3o ]
The year chosen for the day in Gaddafi's life (1996) is just 2 years after the year I spent working there in Tripoli.
Things were going on at the time which we (expats) were not aware of. Some days on arriving at the office (the Tripoli headquarters of a large oil company) there would be posters pinned up all around the building in large black Arabic writing). On asking what they said, I was told that they were instructions/orders from Gaddafi for every Libyan national to gather in what was then Green Square - not far from where we were, to listen to him 'speak to the people'. At 11 o'clock on those days there would be a mass exit of all the Libyan workers and the only people left would be us expats. They would be gone for about 2 hours, and on those days we were instructed we must not leave the building.
I don't know about all of them, but I did find out that on at least one of those occasions they had been summonsed to witness a public hanging in the square. In a 2-weeks out-of-date smuggled in American newspaper (due to the sanctions imposed at that time no English-speaking printed material was allowed in to the country, so when people went on leave we would smuggle back in magazines and newspapers to read and these would be circulated around the expats in our compound with a rota list. When you finished reading you would cross out your name and pass it on to someone else on the list). If you were found in possession of any English-speaking material at any of the many security checks on entering or exiting the country (travelling overland through Tunisia, as it was a no-fly zone and the airport was closed) it would be confiscated and destroyed. Whenever any of the expats was going on leave they would bring with them various letters to expats' families to post when they got to England and we would pass their address to our families and the dates they would be in England for the letters to be sent to their address to smuggle back in. If they posted a letter through the 'normal' postal service they had to be addressed to the company that we worked in, they would take anything from 3 weeks to 2 months to arrive(!) and IF/when they did arrive they would have been opened and heavily censored - big black markers streaked through whole paragraphs and sometimes big holes where sections had been cut out. Photographs sent would invariably be confiscated also, so there was really no point in using that 'postal service'; we had no choice but to go down the smuggling route.
A small few-lined column in this smuggled-in American newspaper said that just 2 weeks previous there had been an attempted coup against Gaddafi, led by his 'right-hand' military person (I forget the name) which had failed and all those involved had been publicly hanged in Green Square, Tripoli, as "an example and deterrent to anyone else attempting to plot against their leader".