Christophe Lier, who performs with his Trio at Hong Kong's Jazz to Kill mini-festival, which starts on Wednesday at the Arts Centre (full story, see Page 4), was an engineer when he first came here three years ago. But he was an engineer with a jazz man's heart: he had been playing jazz at nights in bars across the region, while working days at his desk. It wasn't until he got here that he decided to turn professional, and he has hardly looked back since. Lier will play mainly his own compositions, be-bop and African style jazz, on stage on Friday. Hong Kong's scene is small, he says, but accessible. 'We have the Jazz Club, and there is always a bar that wants jazz music, even though that changes every year.' The Jazz to Kill festival hopes to attract serious jazz fans, prepared to pay to hear the music. Rivals on warpath The battle between the French and the Germans for our cinephile hearts goes on this week with the rival screenings of two excellent films which both confirm the national stereotypes of their respective countries. Or rather the stereotypical obsessions of those countries. Aguirre, Wrath of God, which is screening at the Arts Centre tomorrow night at 8pm, is the first of Werner Herzog's extraordinary epics about eccentrics determined to overcome impossible odds in savage lands. Klaus Kinski plays a Spanish conquistador sent to find El Dorado. Along the way he loses his mind, and most of his crew, and ends up a complete megalomaniac determined to marry his own daughter and start a super race. Kinski and Herzog were close friends, and perhaps only Kinski could have kept up with Herzog's vision for this movie. The Hairdresser's Husband, which the Alliance Francaise are screening at the Space Museum on Wednesday at 7.30pm, is also about an obsession, this time not with conquering the world, but with the ideal of romantic love. The husband in question, played by Jean Rochefort, has been fantasising about hairdressers ever since he spied the remarkable bosom of one in his childhood, but it isn't until middle age that he meets the perfect hairdresser, and marries her. In a British movie, the story would have been the search for the perfect wife. But this is a French one, and the story only really starts once the perfect couple have found one another and discovered even perfect love brings problems. A question of art Painter Lau Wai-ming's work got the formal recognition it deserved, in the form of an Arts Development Council fellowship, only last year, a few months before his untimely death earlier this year. Around 40 of his paintings, created over the past 10 years, will go on display at the Arts Centre from today, in an exhibition called 'Revelation', which is part of the Let's Watch festival. Lau, like all the other contributors to the festival - which includes performances, documentary film screenings, and this exhibition - was physically disabled. He was confined to a wheelchair, and able to paint only with the aid of a specially designed head pointer. His paintings show a strange and surreal version of contemporary life: birds straddle motorbikes, the Hong Kong skyline fades into sharp peaks lined with the Great Wall. They are striking images, and there is no question about the creative talent behind them. But the brushwork itself raises many interesting questions about how art by disabled-bodied artists is compared with work with able-bodied artists. Should it be put in a separate category, and judged only by its own standards? Is that a patronising kind of positive discrimination? These issues will be discussed at a seminar on September 12, at 3pm. Tomorrow, four local able bodied artists who have just completed a workshop project with a group of disabled and able bodied children, will also be talking about these kinds of issues. Para/site had its own exhibition devoted to the works of these children, Passage/Interaction, which has just finished, and Leung Chi-wo, Marc Brulhart, Ling Lee and Virginia Chu will be talking about what they learnt from the collaboration tomorrow at Para/Site at 3pm.