AS WE brace ourselves again for the beginning of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, it seems there are more film festivals today than there are stars to attend them. There's an ever-increasing array of rival events, all fighting over the same, small pool of available films and talent. So the choice of which to attend (and conversely, which to ignore) comes down less to programming, than to the characteristics of a destination.

Cannes is all very well, and Venice is beautiful, of course - but the exotic and unusual begin to look irresistible over the familiar events. One such is held each January in the town of Tromsø, on the coast of Norway. At almost 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle, it is the northern-most film festival in the world, and this alone would be enough to render it noteworthy.

Most festivals are desperate to flaunt their close connection to the mainstream, their proximity (at least in spirit) to Hollywood glamour; this one positively revels in its isolation. Martha Otte, its indefatigable artistic director, points out that, while the rail journey is perfectly pleasant, there are two more spectacular methods of reaching Tromsø, so I resolved to try both: I flew north from Oslo to attend the festival, then took a ferry down the Norwegian coast, back to the port of Bergen.

The descent into Tromsø was breathtaking. By mid-morning, light was beginning to break: a narrow ribbon of pink sky behind high, jagged mountains; otherwise, the whole world seemed reduced to black and white - the stubbly etching of forests; the wavering line of the shore, like handwriting. The sea was grey, flat and unreflective.

Seen from above, it looked like another planet, wilder and less hospitable than our own. The plane passed low over a mountain top smothered in deep drifts of snow. After landing, the chill was extreme, the air so cold and clean that you felt almost light-headed.

Tromsø itself is a small town, a collection of low, mostly wooden buildings hugging the coast. Its streets are narrow and the pavements slippery, a dusting of snow covering a couple of inches of ice. Cars move past slowly, stopping without complaint for you to cross the street. By 2pm it was dark again. Its university is reputedly the northern-most seat of learning in the world, and everywhere were rosy-cheeked, startlingly blonde girls radiating health and tall, intimidatingly well-built young men.

The festival is compact and well organised, and both its audience and its staff are, for the most part, young and enthusiastic. With more than 45,000 admissions, it's one of the most important cultural events in the country. Yet, despite its isolation, one can catch much of the best from bigger festivals - many of the films premiered at Cannes, Venice or Berlin - while at the same time, enjoying an experience more intimate than those events could ever provide.

In Norway, many cinemas are regulated and run by the city government, which ensures a thrillingly diverse array of programming, striking a neat balance between Hollywood and foreign language fare, commercial and arthouse. It also ensures a vital and vibrant film culture.

There are two movie theatres in the town, including the Verdensteatret, the oldest still-operational filmhouse in all of Scandinavia. Built in 1915, it's a narrow picture palace, with colourful folk art murals lining the walls, which seats fewer than 100 viewers - a stark contrast to the huge rooms in the newly built Fokus multiplex just a few blocks away. As the curtains part, you half expect to see a pianist toiling away at the foot of the screen, accompanying the feature.

Like all the town's cinemas, it also boasts a café that serves as a centre of social life. Appropriately, all the music comes from a shelf of vintage vinyl LPs. There's something to be said for sitting by the window, sipping hot chocolate and listening to Neil Young sing Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (complete with surface crackle) as the snow falls steadily outside.

The penultimate day of the festival brought a unique treat. We were taken half an hour west of the town to join a dog-sledding expedition through the snow. The dogs, Alaskan huskies, had the golden fur of Labradors, but eyes of such a pale, piercing blue as to be almost white. After being outfitted in extreme-weather gear, we were placed into one- and two-man sleds, in which we sat cocooned in deer skins. My friend Jay Weissberg, a Variety critic whose passion for the high latitudes of the Arctic is undiminished by his dolce vita in Rome, took the position of driver, standing at the back of the sled. His reasons for doing this soon became clear.

In the recorded annals of dog sledding, it seems astonishing that so little mention is given to perhaps the most indelible aspect of the experience: the loose bowels of the dogs. Yelping with excitement, desperate to hit the tracks, they set off in a flurry of limbs, and at once began farting and defecating uncontrollably. We sat behind them, bouncing along the snow, nauseated by the eggy stench. This settled slightly after about five minutes. Thereafter, the experience greatly improved.

The circuit lasted about an hour, but neither the enthusiasm nor the energy of the dogs appeared to wane. When the huts of the settlement reappeared and the voices of their handlers were heard across the snow, calling them in, there was a palpable sense of disappointment from the animals, as if they wanted to continue on and strike out across the far mountains. Wind chill saw the temperature drop to about -20C, and most people's faces had stopped working. My stubble was crusted with flecks of ice, and my lips were numb.

Climbing rather awkwardly from our sleds, we were ushered inside a large tent, traditional to the indigenous Sami peoples of the region, to be greeted by a huge open fire and a meal of reindeer stew and ligonberries. After lunch, we took turns sledding down a steep hillside on old rubber tyres, yelping with delight like children.

Visible in the distance was the city's main bridge, and across it, the town's most famous landmark: the Tromsdalen Kirke, commonly known as the Arctic Cathedral or Ishavskatedralen (www.ishavskate dralen.no). Designed by Jan Inge Hovig and completed in 1965, it is constructed more or less entirely from concrete, and its tall, vaulted space and acute angles mark it as a distant cousin to the Sydney Opera House - another triumph of Scandinavian design, albeit one turned to a more secular purpose.

The Hurtigruten ferry leaves daily after midnight. The voyage southbound, from icy Kirknes in the north to Bergen, takes six days; from Tromsø, it is four.

Ours was a modern ship - the MS Midnatsol, built in 2003 - more akin to a small-scale ocean liner than the 50-year-old freighters that still feature occasionally in this company's fleet. But there were remarkably few passengers in late January, and those there were appeared, almost without exception, to be locals, shuttling between the various towns of the coast. Billed in the company's literature as "the most beautiful voyage in the world", it also seems one of the most inexplicably overlooked.

As we cast off from Tromsø, the darkness was complete, rendering everything invisible. We woke the next morning to find the same otherworldly landscape as that seen from the plane: the slate-grey sea, the tall imposing peaks. The ferry glided past mountains that rose steeply from the shore into dense reefs of cloud, whole stretches of coast that seemed erased somehow, shrouded in perfect white. And scattered among these, inconceivable in their isolation, were small, bright lights that signified individual houses. What must it be like to live here, you wonder. So remote from one's neighbours - and in such an extreme environment. The landscape itself rejects a human presence. Its scale, its sense of drama and mystery, render man inconsequential.

Along the way, jagged cliffs emerged from the mist like the prows of more massive ships. An hour later, we glided through an archipelago of small islands, frozen into stillness. The silence was absolute. And on clear nights there was the spectacle of the Northern Lights, whose strange, shimmering beauty no words can quite manage to convey. This voyage offered an unforgettable experience and its discovery by visitors will do nothing to diminish the sense of wonder, even awe, that it evoked with every moment.

Shane Danielsen is the former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. For details of this year's event, check the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2007 programme, free in this week's Sunday Herald