On 9 September theartsdesk, Britain's first professional arts journalism site, will be two years old. To celebrate we’re holding a live debate with four leading performers during the Kings Place Festival. An actor, a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist will share their different experiences of performance. Join us, live or online, for a stellar event.

Pop music was virtually eradicated from Iran in 1979 after the deposition of the Shah and arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini in power. Before then, the thriving scene supported many stars that drew on both local traditions and Kurdish music. Googoosh was a huge star, but she stayed in Iran after 1979 and was unable to record. Moving to Los Angeles in 2000 allowed her to perform and begin recording again. The arrival of a new British compilation covering 1970 to 1975 is fascinating. It includes some incredible, head-turning music too.

Hadie Shafdie, Iranian-born and now living in America, uses phrases and words taken from mystical Sufi poetry, incantations of sequences of the names of the divine. She handwrites and prints the devotions, usually spoken or chanted, on thousands of tiny scrolls in a broad spectrum of beguiling colours. The paper is rolled into circles of varying sizes, with the Farsi script almost entirely hidden, and tightly packed into wall-hanging glazed wooden vitrines. The resulting two pieces – 22500 Pages and 26000 Pages, both created this year - are captivating, echoing in stasis the physical act of ecstatic recitation, expressing something of Sufism, the mystical and esoteric forms of Muslim worship. No whirling dervishes here, although they too are Sufi.

Asghar Farhadi’s new film unostentatiously suggests that Iran has many of the same things we have: cars, cash machines, schools, sex, divorce, Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t, we gather, have modern law. Before howls of protest erupt over so banal and Western-slanted a generalisation, I stress that this is the film’s contention: the madness of law the film proposes is not necessarily fact.

Omid Djalili is a funny man with a funny provenance. There are not many stand-ups about who speak the languages of Presidents Havel and Ahmedinejad, who have played both Muslims and Jews without being either one or the other, whose CV includes stints performing Berkoff in Slovak and playing Whoopi Goldberg’s sidekick on NBC. In fact none. Djalili is by his own admission an accidental comedian. Though born (in 1965) in the United Kingdom, his Iranian roots made him an intriguing curiosity when he ditched acting for telling jokes. Then the War on Terror turned his comedy into a timely window on the Middle East.

A journalist’s car breaks down on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere. He’s towed to a tiny hamlet, where small stone houses are overshadowed by huge painted images of the bearded Ayatollah. A woman wearing a black chador insists on speaking to him. "There are things in this village you do not know about," she hisses. Melodramatic, yes, but this powerful, disturbing film is based on a real event in mid-Eighties Iran, which makes it easier - or perhaps harder - to bear.

JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live review

GraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH?

GraemeAThomson Marr's gone with the orange tie. Provocative

JasperRees Are you prepared to speculate about the timing of the Hague twin-bed allegations? Who wins? Who loses?

“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t just the empire. Everyone else who had been, in one sense or another, colonised (women; the working classes; those once termed "adolescents") by literary fiction began articulating their experiences in a manner that often ran counter to past orthodoxies.

As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.

The Los Angeles Film Festival would seem to have everything going for it. There's the perfect Californian weather, the vast number of stars who live and work in the city, and this year there’s been a glamorous new venue in downtown Los Angeles. The 16th festival has also brought in an ambitious new artistic director, former Newsweek film critic David Ansen, who hopes to unite high and low, screening both crowd-pleasers with major Hollywood talent and small, finely crafted foreign films. And yet something has been amiss.