Latitude Festival, for the uninitiated, is Festival Republic's attempt at 'doing a Glastonbury' in the Suffolk countryside, mixing big name bands, poets, authors, actors and all kinds of weird and wonderful cabaret acts in a big, horribly middle class way. It's also absolutely wonderful, as long as you don't think too hard about what attending a festival sponsored by Pimms says about your personality.

The film tent is a large, dark shed sitting between a pie shop and the comedy arena, and its main purpose appears to be to confuse and disorientate revellers wandering in from the sunshine - it's pitch black and as quiet as the grave, so there is a steady stream of punters passing through looking to do as little as possible.

Ironically, Friday is bookended by musicians. The great Michael Nyman, Oscar-winning composer of just about every heart-wrenching piano score in British film history (well, The Piano, at least) plays a selection of his works solo, followed by a Q&A. It's a sober and beautiful start to the festival, and a mark of how inventive Latitude really is that they've invited him down.

At the other end of the day, quirky rockers Guillemots have decided, to the dismay of film purists everywhere, to rescore David Lynch's nightmarish debut Eraserhead with their own composition. It's become a cliché to suggest that frontman Fyfe Dangerfield is a kind of cultural polyglot, but, hey, here he is, shrouded in darkness, making odd reverberating noises in front of an exhausted and confused crowd of Franz Ferdinand fans. A nice idea it might be, but as much of Eraserhead's terrifying magic comes from its unnerving score, stripping this, and the dialogue away hampers the film rather than improves upon it, and we go in search of midnight revellery elsewhere.

The tent is, throughout the weekend, host to a number of talks by filmmakers critics would pay good money to see in any other setting. Director of the new Joy Division documentary Control Grant Gee is on hand to take questions after a screening of the rapturously received film, and on his career-defining Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy. His first question is about the Soviet influences of his montage editing technique, telling you all you need to know about his audience, and most of the festival goers.

Oscar-nominated writer Patrick Marber's talk is much less pretentious - after a screening of new Sam Taylor-Wood short Love You More, which he wrote based on his experiences growing up with The Buzzcocks, he reveals a deep admiration for Amy Winehouse and an aversion to working more than an hour a day - something that resonates with all journalists in attendance.

Despite screening features like Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and The Escapist, by far the most interesting aspect of the tent over the weekend is the proliforation of short films, which punters, eager to race between stages, can digest in a few minutes. The quality varies - the simplistically-animated but utterly terrifying Rabbit, by Run Wrake, and the Oscar winning puppetary of Peter And The Wolf, by Sue Templeton, are highlights, but Brian Crano's blow-up doll comedy Rubberheart fails to impress, despite an introduction by the film's star, Rebecca Hall.

One of the weekend's highlights is Liverpudlian director Chris Shepherd's curation of much of the last day. His softly-spoken and cheerful demeanour hides a dark imagination - of his own shorts, Silence Is Golden and Dad's Dead are intense, claustrophobic experiences, and even a short claymation film made as a teenager is a weird and wonderful introduction to his world. A feature, he promises, is in the pipeline.

And it wouldn't be an alternative music festival if we weren't treated to some musicians doing something a little 'different' in the arts tents. After the blistering excitement of the Buzzcocks set on the Saturday night (which you can read more about in the music section), English roots troubadour Johnny Flynn, who has already played once over the course of the festival, steps up to the plate again to play a set of songs and poetry.

Better live than on record, the Dylanesque Leftovers and Tickle Me Pink were incredibly evocative, both old as the hills and thrillingly new - and astonishingly mature for a 25 year old. He can even write poetry, to a point; a tale of a rabbit and a cat's love life punctuates the performance, and they end by showing a specially-shot video from the weekend's festivities to Tickle Me Pink.

Electro princess George Pringle also bounds onstage for a low-key set, but her chanteuse reciting of poetry over aggressive blips and scratches is a little wearing, despite her smoldering looks reducing many of the male members of the audience's knees to jelly.

Latitude Festival's joys are almost limitless, as the reviews you will find here and in other outlets will attest. Many, however, miss the care, imagination and attention that the festival organisers have put into the arts outlets - especially here in the film arena. For this, they must be applauded, and can rightly consider so far ahead of any of their competitors they are almost out of sight. Same time next year?

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