Pierre Lebeau (driving) and Julien Adam in Roger Cantin's Un Cargo Pour l'Afrique, to screen in the Montreal World Film Festival. (K Films)Quebec's Roger Cantin is hoping to make the transition from a director of light family films to more grown-up fare with his entry in Montreal's World Film Festival.

The festival opens Thursday in Montreal, with Cantin's Un Cargo pour l'Afrique, starring Pierre Lebeau, in competition.

There are 20 features in official competition at the festival, which focuses on new and unusual films from around the world.

The opening movie is The Everlasting Flame, directed by Gu Jun, the official film of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For Cantin, whose earlier films include Matusalem and Hero by Nature, participating in the festival means a higher-profile debut for his work.

"I had a problem in that I did a lot of family films and I had trouble to get out of that image," Cantin told CBC News.

"This film being shown in international competition, I hope it's going to be a turning point in a way to do other films."

Cantin said he was inspired by a Radio-Canada interview with a boy who had lost his mother while very young and also by stories of aid workers who have done extensive work in Africa.

"I mixed that in my head and tried to create a story in which one guy, interpreted by Pierre Lebeau, who all his life has helped others in Africa,... comes back to Canada in a difficult situation. He has no papers — he was evacuated because of a war there and he's determined to go back to Africa."

Lebeau's character decides to stow away on a cargo ship, but then he meets a young boy who helps him change his outlook.

"It's quite a serious film. The main subject is talking about life and death and accepting your own death," Cantin said.

The festival also plans an homage to Quebec actor Lebeau, a Jutra prize winner and star of Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Les Boys.

Jean-Carl Boucher, right, the young star of 1981 with director Ricardo Trogi. (Alliance Films) Also showing opening day is 1981, Quebec director Ricardo Trogi's third feature, a comedy about a young boy whose family moves to another neighbourhood. The autobiographical film recalls the year 1981 in his own life, the year his family moved to a richer area, said Trogi, whose previous films include Québec-Montréal and Horloge Biologique.

"Just by sitting in the class, I was able to see the difference in the kind of pencil people were using. I said. 'By God, these people have more money than I have.' Starting from there, I had to lie about a lot of stuff in order to be in the group, you know," he said.

Part of the pleasure of making the film was looking back on those years when he was 10 or 11 and finding the comedy he couldn't see at the time.

"The young ones shooting, I'm not sure they were quite getting all the humour around the scenes," he said of his young cast. "The technicians were laughing a lot, but these guys didn't really know what was funny, and I guess it's timing" that does that.

The festival is known for its competition for first-time directors and student directors and for having a screening venue that shows exclusively Quebec-made films.

Among the student directors is Toronto's Heather Slepchik, who is showing her film The Last of the Redheads, which she made after learning red hair could disappear from the human race in 100 years because it's so unusual.

"As a child, I was the only redhead in my class growing up. All the time, I was called freckle-face, I was called carrot-top, temper tantrum," Slepchik said.

"As I got older, it turned into something I wanted to embrace in a positive light," she said, adding that she talked to dozens of redheads about their experiences for her documentary.

Her film will premiere Sept. 1 at the festival. There are more than 400 shorts and feature-length films in the program.

The Montreal World Film Festival runs Aug. 27 to Sept. 7.