I'm surely getting much too old to cry at films, but the recent movies of Shane Meadows have stimulated my tear ducts in a way that few directors have managed.

In fact, I can't remember ever blubbing quite so uncontrollably in a cinema as I did on the morning of 19th August, 2004 - at an EIFF press/industry screening in the then UGC - as the credits rolled on Dead Man's Shoes.

Just as sportswriters are expected not to cheer in stadium press boxes, film critics in theory aren't supposed to let their emotions get the better of them - and maybe that's why I waited for the auditorium to clear before making my way, red of eye and gluey of nose, into the soberingly fresh air of Fountain Park.

It was over three years before any film had a similar effect - and, perhaps uncoincidentally, it involved that man Meadows again. No, not This Is England. I know it's easily his most money-spinning and award-laden effort to date, Dead Man's Shoes having suffered the fate of so many masterpieces - shunned by the public before building a surprisingly large and passionate cult-following (even Mark E Smith waxes enthusiastic about it in his recent autobiography). But while I can see This Is England's many qualities, it somehow left me stubbornly dry-eyed.
 
No such ocular aridity in the case of Shane's follow-up: a little picture called Somers Town (75 minutes, black-and-white, minimal-budget), originally intended, believe it or not, as a promotional short for Eurostar. I caught it back in February when it world-premiered at Berlin's behemoth of a film-festival - tucked away in the section dedicated to younger viewers, 'Generation'.

The general consensus was that this unheralded eleventh-hour entry - a superbly-observed miniature about the friendship that develops, one lazy London summer, between a down-on-his-luck Midlands kid (This Is England's Thomas Turgoose) and a Polish-immigrant teenager (Piotr Jagiello) - was much better than many of the hoity-toity big-budget projects showing in the festival's main competition section.

Me, I "only" saw fifteen movies in Berlin - but Meadows' was by far the most impressive, and that includes a handful of supposed "masterpieces" from the retrospective sections. Indeed, I'll be amazed if it's not still in my top five of the year come Hogmanay.

And while the tragic finale of Dead Man's Shoes elicited poignant tears of sadness, the buoyant climax of Somers Town set off what felt more like waterworks of joy. Or am I just getting soppy in my dotage? I suggest you find out for yourself at Fountain Park later this month...

Neil Young is covering EIFF 2008 for The Hollywood Reporter and Tribune magazines, and the website Jigsaw Lounge.
He is a journalist, film festival programmer and film-maker, currently in post-production on a pair of "experimental" documentaries entitled Superflex November and Rostropovich at Tsukiji.

Somers Town is screening 20 and 21 June at Cineworld. Shane Meadows: Skillset In Person takes place on 21 June at Cineworld.