Films which crash into the imagination as hard as Head-On are few and far between. Driven by a thunderous soundtrack that includes the Sisters of Mercy, Depeche Mode and Birthday Party, the film follows Cahit and Sibel, two Turkish-German outsiders brought together by a chance meeting at a hospital. Linked by their ethnicity and longing to live free of tradition, morality and responsibility, Sibel hatches a plan to escape her family's suffocating protection. The film has already won European Film of the Year 2004 and the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival, as well as best actor and actress awards for Birol Unel and Sibel Kekilli, who play the two leads. The creative force behind it all is writer and director Fatih Akin. Born in Hamburg of Turkish descent, he started out as an actor before turning his hand to filmmaking, a subject he speaks about with passion. The Goethe Institute film preview and Q&A with the director provide a great opportunity to meet one of European filmmaking's brightest new stars.

NB: if you cannot make this Q&A screening catch another at the Curzon Soho on Thu 27/01 at 6:30pm.

These artists both offer a critique of the way we live today; in an absurd cocoon of mass media and consumerism. Laurette launched his career by declaring himself a multi-media artist on a French game-show. He has since lived off "satisfied or your money back" products from supermarkets, created a TV show, The Great Exchange, where he spent the budget on a car that was gradually swapped for items of lesser value until he finally ended up with six blues glasses. His work questions the values we assign to things and he collects multiple nationalities, sharing this information on www.citizenship-project.com. Where Laurette subverts, Melhus parodies. In his films he satirises voyeuristic, Jerry Springer-style confessional TV shows, zeroing in on their prurience. He plays all the roles, adopting a variety of grotesque disguises. With their flickering light, senseless repetition and frenzied delivery, these films mesmerise like a kind of demonic channel-surfing. The artists will discuss their work and address the topic Heaven and Earth as part of a multidisciplinary conference with Goethe Institute and The London Consortium.

NB: on Sat 29/01 (6:30 - 9pm) catch Luc Ferrari, Kaffe Matthews, David Grubbs and Achim Wollscheid, among others, perform The Sound of Heaven and Earth at Tate Modern (also part of the conference).

When Walter Benjamin introduced a new translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens, rather than ruminating on the work itself, he pondered over the notion of "translatability". Each poem possesses more than just subject matter; there exists content beyond content. At that point, is the translation a new work, or transparent facsimile in another language? Hence a "poet" is required to facilitate the genesis of this irreducible quality, and celebrity translators include Haruki Murakami (English into Japanese), Seamus Heaney (Anglo-Saxon into English) and Paul Auster (French into English). Now to help recognise the importance -- and responsibility -- of this task, The Poetry Society has been awarding the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation, and to publicise this year's event poet David Constantine, who won the very first with his translation of Lighter than Air by Hans Magnus Enzenberger in 2003, will be speaking on the topic.

NB: tickets cannot be ordered through the shop, they are only available from The Poetry Society on 020.7420.9895 or marketing@poetrysociety.org.uk.

That the world of advertising and promos is a rich source of video-freakery, sophistication and beauty is something we are more aware of courtesy of Mirrorball, relentless champions of these sparkly forms. This latest Curzon screening arrives via Nippon and the Edinburgh Film Festival and offers up a selection from the fascinating, burgeoning scene that exists in Japan. It highlights the fact that being strapped for cash and time, as Japanese promo directors generally are, can in fact cultivate a tradition of pure imaginative creativity, born out of necessity. The twelve works to be screened have been put together by directors such as Koichiro Tsujikawa, Hideyuki Tanaka, Steve Nakamura and the wonderfully inventive 6nin collective. Expect a mind-blowing union of light, sound, technology and utter craziness.

NB: for you aspiring filmmakers out there you still have just under a month to submit work for the onedotzero9 festival (deadline 25/02).

"Art school post-punk" is a phrase that's bandied around a lot these days with acts like Franz Ferdiand, Bloc Party and The Futureheads dominating the music press. All of these groups doff their caps to Gang of Four though the meaning of the phrase has mutated since its original conception in the late '70s when the Gang first formed. Their alien sound of popping funk bass lines, stark driving beats and urgent male vocals shocked the punk scene then and today they still sound exhilarating and dangerous. The stripped, raw sound pithily encapsulates their subject matter; GOF are some of the finest political songwriters we have. So often when musicians try to use their position to do something worthwhile the weight of their cause supersedes the music, resulting in worthy but clumsy lyrics and bad noise, such as the Manic Street Preachers. GOF's anti-capitalist stance may seem a little naive in these jaded times but the lyrics are succinct and beautifully matched by their minimalist sound. See the original line-up play on Friday because they are the original Art Punks and today's scene owe them too much for you to ignore.

One of techno's original innovators and the founding father of the recently emerged glammed-up electro house sound, Felix da Housecat -- party animal, entrepreneur and genius -- is playing at The Key. If we were compiling a dictionary definition of his recent tweeter-bothering sound you'd notice the inclusion of a lot of words, which, taken out of context, would sound preposterous or even, perhaps, imaginary: jackin', electroclash, lipstick, silver screen, glitz, and so on. If you're looking for an evening of pure sleaze, the soundtrack to stumbling out of a limousine on your way into a nightclub at 3am wearing a Cristal froth around the corners of your mouth and an outfit intended for a member of the opposite sex, this is it. As if this weren't enough, support comes from Playtime DJs -- more synthy, aggressive, glam house is expected. Nowhere near as dressy as similar events such as Pushka, this is debauched house for those who don't want to go ridiculously over the top. However, if you do decide to turn up in your diamante chaps, nobody will bat an eyelid.

Unravelling Modernism is a three-hour crash course in what it means to "make it new". Interestingly, the Whitechapel Gallery website provides few details about the format of these three hours, making the contents of this crash course as elusive as the subject it aims to expound. Despite this and the sentiments of obscurity at the heart of many contemporary schools of thought, the desire to define in exacting and precise terms prevails. Web users can bypass hours of seminar debates by asking Jeeves "What is Modernism?" and Wikipedia makes the task of definition oh-so simple. Conceptual nuances are sidelined. Forming part of the Whitechapel's Unravelling... series of talks, Unravelling Modernism complements the gallery's ongoing exhibition, Faces in the Crowd. Taking as its title an extract from Ezra Pound's In the Station of the Metro, the exhibition is an artistic tour de force. Trying to unravel the mysteries of Modernism in three hours is likely to have a similarly intense impact.

NB: Faces in the Crowd runs till 06/03.

A score-free classical concert is the lucky dip of the music world. You're quietly hoping for a Rolex watch but usually bag a bar of low-grade chocolate that unsettles your guts for days. This Tate concert takes the annotation-free route, but plans to deliver a quality experience using an aural rather than visual score. Confused? Bear with us, this may well be the future of classical music. In essence, a group of eminent composers, including Luc Ferrari, Kaffe Matthews, and David Grubbs, have created an audio score, using everything from verbal stimuli such as poetry to other music and sounds. An ensemble will simultaneously hear, interpret and perform said aural score. You won't see conductors waving their arms around either, as visual direction is not allowed. This concert is part of Heaven and Earth (27/01 to 29/01) -- a multidisciplinary conference organised in collaboration with Goethe Institut London and the London Consortium -- and will either be brimming with sublime moments up there with the swelling crescendo on the Beatles' "A Day in The Life", or be a migraine-inducing racket from beginning to end. Either way, it's worth going along if only to witness a barmy idea bravely realised.

NB: make sure to catch Luc Ferrari on Mon 31/01 (6:30pm) when he gives a talk at Tate Modern.

Surely Birmingham, a perfectly good place that has been caricatured as an ugly cultural wasteland with an unpopular accent to boot, must be the world's most unfairly maligned Second City? Those regular PR campaigns proclaiming self-reinvention seem to fall on deaf ears: "Well I went past it on the motorway and it looked horrible" being the man on the street's timeless retort. Since when were the nice parts of a city to be found at the side of a motorway? Presenting "supersonic treats from the city of Birmingham" in a small east London venue probably won't blast away all those years of prejudice, but it's testimony to a flourishing music scene. Appearing will be the ZX Spectrum and Modified Toy Orchestras, Plone member Mike in Mono, avant-pop group Esquilax and electronic soundscapers Black Galaxy featuring, curiously enough, ex-Napalm Death member / "grindcore" creator Nicholas Bullen. Certainly very worth checking out. Just don't order red, red wine at the bar.

Fabric's Saturday night line-up -- a marginally more relaxed affair than the fury of the Friday night Fabric Live beatfest -- has read in the past like a Who's Who of house DJs, and this forthcoming event is no exception. Having built themselves solid reputations from previous Soul Heaven events and residencies at the incredibly-designed and huge-capacity club, soulful house champions such as Craig Bartlett are joined by Masters at Work maestro Louie Vega, one of the leading lights in the scenes of house production and DJing and longtime cohort of Kenny Dope. If the appearance of this good-time guy isn't enough to draw you along, and you're in the mood for something a little harder, tech-house genius Terry Francis is joined at the event by Detroit techno superstar Stacey Pullen. Furious melodies and hard, soulful songs all night -- and in one of London's foremost venues. Unmissable.

For this first showcase of the label founded and run by Thomas Morr in Berlin, three powerful and symbolic electronica acts are being presented. Austrian Bernhard Fleischmann first came to light with his TMP release on Charhizma, a full length album containing two long tracks of organically placed ambient electronica. Last year's double album, Welcome Tourist, was recorded with a five-piece band in collaboration with Charizmas' boss Christof Kurzmann, the great lapsteel guitarist Martin Siewert (part of the improv/electronica trio Trapist on Thrill Jockey), Burkhard Stangs and double bass player Werner Dafeldecker. Christian Kleine (City Centre Offices) is the Berlin-based guitarist/electronic musician and one of the first artists on the German Label -- he is also a software developer at Ableton Live, the current fad of live audio sequencing used by artists such as Akufen, Scanner, Mogwai and more. Finally, you will be hearing the sounds of the UK duo ISAN, aka Robin Saville and Antony Ryan, based in Southend and Reading respectively. Their live experience is "seemingly based around a large tangle of wires and an ever-growing collection of lucky cats". Quite a (Sunday) night...

At the sprightly age of 75, Luc Ferrari is ever active in expanding our world of sound with his recordings and performances. Alongside Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Ferrari was a pioneer in "musique concrete", a form of tape music using non-musical sounds ordered into revelatory compositions. Back in 1970 Ferrari completed Presque Rien No. 1, where he recorded the ambient sounds of a village in Yugoslavia throughout the day, then seamlessly compressed the 24 hours into just 21 minutes, with no traditional musical sounds present at all. This was the work that was to reshape our understanding of sound, capturing the music of the world around us everyday. As with many contemporary composers who have re-invented music through the use of computer technology, Ferrari anticipated this process with the domestic tape recorder, bringing the natural world around us into his compelling sound environment. His life story connects via Messiaen, Honegger, Edgard Varese, Stockhausen, David Grubbs, John Zorn, and our very own Scanner. An extremely rare opportunity to catch a master on these shores, in both performance and conversation.

NB: on Sat 29/01 (6:30 - 9pm) catch Luc Ferrari, Kaffe Matthews, David Grubbs and Achim Wollscheid, among others, perform The Sound of Heaven and Earth at Tate Modern.

Adapted from the excellent novel by Sebastien Japrisot, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou, A Very Long Engagement certainly fulfils its promise. As in Jeunet's last film Amelie, Tautou plays the role of a beautiful young woman, Mathilde, who lives in a bleak world, which she escapes through her lucid imagination. But this time there is a grown-up storyline. Mathilde is a nineteen-year-old orphan who is handicapped by childhood polio. Her true love, the son of a lighthouse keeper, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) has been called up to fight in WWI. The gritty narrative follows him and four soldiers as they are forced to confront the horror of the trenches. Mathilde plays her tuba for solace, because it is "the only instrument capable of emitting a cry of distress". Her fiance is condemned to death for self-mutilation and pushed into no-man's land between the French and German armies. It appears that he has perished in a living hell. But Mathilde refuses to believe that Manech is dead and embarks on an investigation into a secret cover-up over his death, which leads her to Brittany, Corsica and Paris and back to their shared childhood. Along the way she meets a feisty widow Elodie (Jodie Foster with a flawless French accent). This film is a gripping romance, tragic and heart-warming by turns. It has a light touch and vibrant colour, which fans of Amelie will enjoy.

The Wallace Collection is one of the under-rated greats of London's galleries and museums. Situated behind Selfridges, it feels more like a stately home than a museum, with its proliferation of ornate furniture and maze of rooms presenting pieces from the collection of the fourth Marquess of Hertford, who, on his death in 1870, bequeathed it to his estranged illegitimate son, Richard Wallace. The collection includes the slightly disappointing The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals, which, together with works by Rembrandt, Poussin and Rubens has remained free to view. Since last September, however, they have added an additional paying exhibition of some of the great works of Francois Boucher. To further look at the Rococo style that permeates Boucher's work, Intelligence2 and Wallace are holding a debate and dinner that proposes the question "is the style a supreme example of decorative harmony or too frivolous for words?" Those who will be arguing the former include television fop Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen partnering The Times columnist Simon Jenkins. Squaring up across the debate table will be Evening Standard Homes and Property deputy editor Philippa Stockley and National Galleries of Scotland supremo Sir Timothy Clifford. In the middle, Telegraph art critic and Wallace trustee, Richard Dorment. After the debate, dinner will be served in the Wallace's conservatory for those who wish.

NB: tickets may be purchased by calling the Boucher ticket line on 020.7887.8998, online or in person at the Wallace Collection.

After finally bagging a long-awaited Booker Prize win for 1998's Amsterdam, you might have expected Ian McEwan to collapse on the finishing line. In fact he's ageing pretty darn gracefully. While the contemporaries that joined him on the mythic 1983 Granta shortlist of hot young novelists -- Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker -- are nodding off in their armchairs, McEwan is still producing exciting novels. Atonement, his last, was widely regarded as one of his best and on Wednesday next week at the RFH he will be reading from his latest book, Saturday, set in London against the backdrop of September 11th. If this all sounds tediously topical, there is hope. McEwan is that rare thing: a serious writer who knows how to turn out a good thriller, instinctively prioritising pace over preaching. Anyone interested in background reading can check out '80s The Innocent, a coolly atmospheric Cold War thriller set in '50s Berlin. We have our fingers crossed over this one.

Think of Portugal and port comes to mind; more recently a certain outrageous West London manager led FC Porto to European glory. In art we mainly think of Paula Rego, though in London Joao Penalva also flies the flag. At the last Venice Biennale, Pedro Cabrita Reis -- Portugal's representative -- created eddies of serenity with his neon, air-conditioned shanty in the Giardini, and now here in Camden, his show -- titled Stillness -- continues his Arte Povera attitude of finding materials and creating work in situ. A risky but jazzy strategy, the three large sculptures, accompanied by his trademark painted, found glass relief/paintings, create a highly elegant and poetic sense of loss. Each element belongs to the site, thus architecture and memory become a part of his discourse; new things come from old, while ruminations over modernisms simmer. With doors and window frames joined by steel girders, Cabrita Reis' mood is more vulnerable and humorous than, say, Jannis Kounellis', which is more a kick in the stomach. (Runs tills 6/02).

NB: a counterpoint to Cabrita Reis' elegance is this small but scholarly show of Francis Picabia's dot and abstract paintings. A last ditch at creating a non-representational painting before his finances forced him into the more pornographic absurdities for which he is known, these paintings are accompanied by his film collaboration, Entr'acte (1924), with Rene Clair and guest starring a very young Duchamp. This idiosyncratic oeuvre is a must-see. (This exibition also runs till 06/02). The Centre also runs a series of talks and art classes, check the site for details. While in Finchley, also visit the Freud Museum.

Russian History may sound like an epic theme to tackle, but the Photographers' Gallery provides an eloquent lesson in such cultural reflection. Melanie Manchot's colour photographs and multi channel video work inhabit the main gallery -- in her Groups and Locations (Moscow) series, passers-by stand almost defiantly, whilst history looms in the spaces around them; sites including the Pushkin Museum, the Aeroflot building and the metro evoke the grand narratives that these people live amongst. Manchot's video portraits, which illustrate the nature of history as personal reconstruction, feature individual Muscovites recalling myths surrounding the Hotel Moscow -- a landmark with a remarkable pedigree thanks to Joseph Stalin. Images from the David King Collection hang in the cafe -- pages from a book, designed and later defaced by Alexander Rodchenko, which reveal how a dark chapter of Russian history was reconstituted. (Runs till 27/02.)

NB: a series of events accompanying the season includes talks and screenings of contemporary Russian video art. Also, catch Melanie Manchot's photography workshops at Tate Modern.

Unravelling against the backdrop of imminent American invasion, Turtles Can Fly presents a devastating picture of children struggling for survival in a muddy refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. With thick glasses, flashy bike and a few words of English, entrepreneur Satellite is the leader of a group of children who collect unexploded mines to scrape a living. These children have created an autonomous community apart from, but deeply inflected by the chaos of the adult world. Satellite's life changes with the arrival of an armless boy with second-sight, his beautiful, profoundly traumatised sister and a blind, curly-haired toddler. Bahman Ghobadi, acclaimed director of A Time for Drunken Horses, activates remarkable performances from his amateur cast, who are acting their own lives. The director documents the pain and surrealism of war; a small child wanders through stacks of rusty shells, a boy who has lost his arms deactivates a mine with his teeth. Bush and Saddam are glimpsed briefly on a television screen, both equally remote from the suffering of these children. This intensely moving film, the first to come out of Iraq since the fall of Saddam, offers the necessary antidote to CNN Vietnam-war-movie-style news coverage.

Robert Mapplethorpe, iconic photographer, controversial artworld darling of the '70s and '80s, dismissed by some as offensive pornographer, is given a posthumous artists'-eye-view of his work at the Alison Jacques gallery, as David Hockney presents a selection of celebrated poses and previously unseen work on three floors of the Mayfair gallery. A gleeful range of famous creative names and faces are featured -- from Iggy Pop, a young Richard Gere and Mapplethorpe's sometime lover Patti Smith, to William Burroughs (with typewriter), and a rollcall of contemporary artists, including Lichtenstein, de Kooning, Ruscha and Haring, as well as Hockney and Mapplethorpe himself -- sometimes in drag. The most enlightening images though are perhaps Mapplethorpe's still lives, including a number of his striking flowers, pared down, abstracted and full of contrast, and occasionally humorously placed, one set of inanimate images reading Flower, Fish, C*ck.

NB: runs till 14/03.

In 2002, Roots Manuva's Run Come Save Me album was nominated for the Mercury Prize and the inevitable "Saviour of UK rap" hyperbole wasn't far behind. Halfwits suggested this 29-year old from Stockwell was solely responsible for turning British rap into a going concern. On his return single "Colossal Insight", it's clear he's having none of it, opining "I don't give a damn about UK rap / I'm a UK black, making UK tracks" over a loping, low-end rumble and the kind of loopy synths that usually accompany tweety birds and recent concussion in cartoons. However, the title track suggests his small measure of success threatened to send him potty. Straining to be heard through buzzing distortion, sirens and whiplash beats, Manuva insists he narrowly avoided the "funny farm" where "kinky nurses... poke you in the arse". Noting he spent much time "smoking a few trees", it could also be the most convincing argument for just saying no since Zammo Maguire. Throughout this album, the flow remains intact; at once ponderous and lithe, and the idiomatic "cheese on toast" rhymes are all over the place, even the title sounds like a Terry Thomas one-liner. Awfully Deep offers the same mix of innovation and immediacy that caused all the hoopla in the first place.

To buy Awfully Deep online click here.

A celebrated fashion photographer, Craig McDean was born in Manchester and later moved to London to study photography where he assisted Nick Knight for two years before venturing out on his own, shooting for The Face and i-D. Since then, he has photographed countless beauties and many a pop icon or movie star and continues regularly to contribute to all the major fashion magazines. As well as various fashion campaigns for clients such as Yves Saint Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, Calvin Klein and Givenchy amongst others, McDean has also turned his talent to directing, shooting commercials for Calvin Klein and Versus. His aptly named book Lifescapes departs from his usual fashion photography and represents vignettes from his various travels and road trips, revealing his own personal vision of the world. The images are in fact an amalgamation of five or six different shots and although McDean uses modern digital equipment to blend his images together, traditional darkroom methods are preserved thus retaining a certain distant quality of the great landscape photography of times past. Intriguing images that will titillate the imagination...

To buy Lifescapes online click here or buy it through Walther Koenig Books at the Serpentine Gallery (020.7706.4907).

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the Capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

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