Montreal’s World Film Fest founder and president Serge Losique has long contended that his event is an exercise in class. If the Toronto International Film Festival were the Hollywood equivalent of a Big Mac, he considers his fest a glass of fine European wine. TIFF is a video game, WFF has subtitles – or so the WFF-made mythology goes. It’s a contrast Losique and his crew have gone out of their way to highlight in interviews over the years.

This year, with the added wrinkle of competition from the fledgling New Montreal FilmFest, Losique is calling on all his connections and trotting out a who’s who list of European and international talent to demonstrate that his is a festival with artistic integrity and cultural clout.

Losique has announced that WFF ’05 will include a lifetime achievement award and tribute to Chen Kaige, one of China’s greatest auteurs. With award-winning fare such as Farewell My Concubine (1993) and The Emperor and the Assassin (1999), Kaige perfectly reinforces the WFF’s sloganeering about its upper-crust status. Along with receiving an award, Kaige will be fêted with screenings of some of his films.

Though the WFF has done away with its Panorama Canada section, there are still a number of noteworthy homegrown entries among the scheduled 342 films. This includes Neil, the second feature from filmmaker Boris Mojsovski, in which an intensely agoraphobic man begins to get over his fears as a mysterious woman arrives claiming to be his long-lost love. Renowned Montreal filmmaker Claude Gagnon will have the world premiere of his latest film, the Canadian-Japanese coproduction Kamataki, about a young man attempting to rebuild his life after a failed suicide attempt. Among the more experimental feature entries is La Pharmacie de l’espoir, François Gourd’s movie in which 39 actors improvised the entire movie for 12 hours in a café – the edited results make up this ambitious 76-minute film.

The National Film Board is also presenting several animated films at this year’s WFF, including Oscar-nominee Chris Hinton’s latest, cNote, which is part of the official competition. Shira Avni’s critically acclaimed short John and Michael, an animated film about two men with Down syndrome, will also screen, as will Zarqa Nawaz’s NFB documentary about sexism within Islamic tradition, titled Me and the Mosque.

Despite claims that Losique is on the ropes, one would never know it from his jury member list. Chairing the group will be auteur Theo Angelopoulos, widely regarded as Greece’s greatest living filmmaker. The filmography of Angelopoulos, who has long made subversive films during rough political times in his homeland, includes The Beekeeper (1986), Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998).

The jury will also include: Chilean director Silvio Caiozzi, whose art-house hits include Julio Begins in July (1977), The Moon in the Mirror (1990) and Coronation (2000); Pavel Lungin, the Muscovite director behind the Russian hit Taxi Blues (1990); and the prolific Spanish author Vicente Molina Fox, who also directed the 2001 film Sagitario.

For Euro-stargazers, two women on the jury will add considerable continental star power to the WFF. Amira Casar, star of Catherine Breillat’s controversial and sexually brash Anatomy of Hell, will serve on the jury, as will Anna Karina, the Danish-born actress who became a Jean-Luc Godard regular in what is arguably the auteur’s greatest period, appearing in everything from Une femme est une femme (1961) to Alphaville (1965).

WFF prizes traditionally include the Grand Prix of the Americas, the Jury Award, best artistic contribution, the Ecumenical Prize, best short film and best Canadian short.

The WFF has also announced that the Montreal International Digital Market will hold a conference on digital distribution and exhibition on Aug. 29 and 30 in conjunction with the festival. Guests and panelists at the conference will include Frank Stirling, CEO and president of Breakpoint Digital; Mark Kimball, director of digital production for Walt Disney; Amie Hardie, exec director of DocSpace; and Gwendal Auffret, CEO of AvantiDigital.

Montreal’s World Film Festival takes place Aug. 26-Sept. 5.