The Colonel’s Stray Dogs

With a million-dollar bounty on his head, Ashur Shamis lived for years in Muammar Gadaffi’s crosshairs. A profile of a political activist as well as a portrait of a father and the family worried for decades for his safety, The Colonel’s Stray Dogs sees filmmaker Khalid Shamis return home to explore his father’s role in the Libyan resistance to Colonel Gadaffi’s brutal rule, both in Libya and from exile in London. Through a compelling interplay between archive footage and intimate conversations between father and son, as well as with his family, Shamis uncovers aspects of his father’s work that were kept from him as a child, from assassination attempts to conflicts within the resistance itself, before his transition into one of the foremost commentators on Libyan politics. The film is both a personal journey of discovery for a son and a look into the machinations of liberation, and in its own way, asks questions about the personal cost of activism.