ABSTRACT
The labour of missing lies therefore in structuring and maintaining a conversation with an absence made uncannily present when tangibly unavailable. The story told to the film maker by the combatant charges an object in absentia with an operative uncanniness. The catalyst was provided by the dubious and sudden apprehension of the several members of the long-forgotten Japanese Red Army by agents of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces. Among them was Kozo Okamoto, renowned for having launched a gruesome attack with the assault rifles and grenades along with two other Red Army guerrillas on Lod Airport in Tel Aviv on 30 May 1972. First released in 1981, the film is titled Beirut al-liqa, literally Beirut the Meeting, a title deceptively simple, which eludes translation in that the noun Beirut is also that which conditions al-liqa'.
