Muammar Gaddafi was 27 years old and born in a tent in the Libyan desert when he overthrew King Idris I in 1969, and he stayed in power for four decades despite revolts, military strikes, and international embargoes. Director Antoine Vitkine builds the film around interviews with former diplomats, negotiators, and insiders who dealt with Gaddafi directly, piecing together how a man widely dismissed in the West as an erratic despot kept outmaneuvering the governments trying to contain him. The film traces his read of Western self-interest, particularly the leverage Libyan oil and counterterrorism cooperation gave him with the same capitals that sanctioned him, and the theatrical staging he used at summits and on state television to control his own image. Firsthand accounts describe closed-door meetings where his negotiating tactics shifted from menace to charm within the same conversation. The picture that emerges is not a madman but a strategist who understood exactly how far Western pragmatism would bend, and who used that knowledge to survive far longer than his rivals expected.