TORONTO – The Toronto film festival opens Thursday with a selection of films this year largely focused on human rights abuses and crossing cultural boundaries.

"We've all seen filmmakers address human rights abuses in documentaries, but we're also seeing it in fiction this year," said film festival co-director Cameron Bailey.

"They've made a triumphant effort to champion the rights of people that have been trampled," he told AFP.

Some of the best include Shlomi Eldar's "Precious Life," which chronicles the struggle of an Israeli pediatrician and a Palestinian mother to get treatment for her sick baby, Kim Longinotoo's "Pink Saris" about combating violence against women in India, and Larysa Kondracki's leap into Bosnia's sex-trafficking underworld in "The Whistleblower."

These are "disturbing and powerful" stories about "the sometimes surprising world we live in," commented Bailey, pointing also to Gabriel Range's "I am Slave," inspired by the shocking real life London slave trade.

Audiences may also gain "new perspectives" on recent real life cultural clashes, he said, following the uproar over the August arrival of 492 Tamil asylum seekers in Canada and France's much-criticized expulsions of nearly 1,000 Roma to Bulgaria and Romania since the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a high profile security crackdown in June.

As demonstrated by the Spanish conquest of America in Iciar Bollain's "Even the Rain," to the crossroads of continents and civilization in Istanbul in Emre Sahin's "40" and the fictional Khan family's return from England to the Punjab in Andy De Emmony's "West is West" (the sequel to his 1999 acclaimed "East is East"), "the movement of people affects the entire world," Bailey said.

Festival programmers picked several films to present this year that explore "how that happens, what it means and how do people really feel about it," he said.

The festival is the biggest in North America and has traditionally been a key event for Oscar-conscious studios and distributors because it is attended by a sizable contingent of North American media.

Unlike the Cannes and Berlin festivals, Toronto does not award jury prizes.

But moviegoers who bought some 500,000 tickets for the event in 2009 awarded an audience prize for best motion picture to Lee Daniels' "Precious," based on the 1996 novel by Sapphire about an obese, illiterate girl from Harlem dealing with abuse and incest.

The film went on to win for best supporting actress and screenwriting at the 82nd Academy Awards.

This year the festival, which opens Thursday evening with Michael McGowan's "Score: A Hockey Musical" and runs until September 19, will showcase 258 feature films and 81 shorts from 59 countries, including 112 world premieres.

Audiences are also to be treated to panel discussions with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, basketball star Steve Nash and singer Bruce Springsteen.

Movie stars including Nicole Kidman, Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Catherine Deneuve, Kevin Spacey, Matt Damon, Michael Sheen, Mickey Rourke, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell Megan Fox, Uma Thurman and Olivia Newton-John are expected to grace the red carpet.

Giants of cinema Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford will also return to Toronto for the first time in decades to premier their new films "Hereafter" and "The Conspirator," respectively.

And India's Aamir Khan has already stirred up "a lot of commotion," said Bailey, over the upcoming world premier of his "Mumbai Diaries."