The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) at Latitude

It's summertime again, even in sodden old England, and that means it's festival season. True to its image as one of the newer and smaller festivals in the UK, Latitude had a good-natured crowd, diverse music - albeit without many big-name bands, was laid-back and eclectic, and not too muddy.

The defining highlight for me was a showing of The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (IMDB, Wikipedia), a beautiful rendition of tales from Arabian Nights, using stop-motion shadow-puppetry, accompanied by a haunting live musical soundtrack by Little Sparta. I've wanted to see the movie for ages - it is the oldest surviving feature-length animation, and was brought about by the dedication of one woman, Lotte Reiniger who single-handedly constructed all the cutouts in the movie using nothing more than scissors, and then animated them all by hand.