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Canadian director Rafaël Ouellet has lived in Montréal for close to two decades, but for his fourth feature film, Camion (available on iTunes), he returned to his home village in the province of Québec: Dégelis, juste à côté de New Brunswick, a study in ochres and umbers at twilight. He was motivated by something like the kind of skin-pinching nostalgia you see in Edward Burns’ Brothers McMullen or Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls — like trying to fit into that old band T-shirt you’ve outgrown. Now in his early 30s, he’s in a position to honor the manual-labor lifestyle there without sentimentalizing about it.

Ouellet studied film editing at school, and went on to direct for TV; though he’s broken into film, he continues to work in both worlds. He’ll direct a TV series this summer and a movie in the winter. He’s also working on a fictional documentary about just-graduated high school seniors to shoot in 2014 or 2015.

While parts of Camion (which means “truck” in French) fit the fictional-documentary mold — Ouellet’s father drove a truck, as does the father played by Julien Poulin — other sources of inspiration are local to the Northwest. A musical touchstone for Ouellet is the Portland band Richmond Fontaine, whose work first dropped into Ouellet’s lap out of an issue of Uncut Magazine, on one of those free compilation CDs. (He ended up buying the song for use in his earlier film Derrière Moi.) Through Willy Vlautin’s songs, he discovered the fiction of Raymond Carver, which he offers as an influence on Camion.

You see Carver everywhere then: in Poulin’s grizzled truckdriver’s slow disintegration following a fatal collision; in Samuel’s (Patrice Dubois) stultifying janitorial job, comparing paint shades as a tinny voice recites a to-do list through ear buds; in Samuel’s wastrel brother Alain (Stephane Breton) and his (serial, you suspect) womanizing, somehow accomplished by reciting poetry in bars. Just as you rarely summit the transcendent moment in Carver, Ouellet’s film contents itself with gentle curves and slight hills. Samuel picks up on a strange tone is a voicemail from his dad Germain, and collecting Alain from a new embrace, they head back home to head off anything serious.

I told Ouellet (over juice at Uptown Espresso, during a SIFF screening that day) that, with Germain in a depressed state, it was difficult to imagine the person he was before, but Ouellet responded that you could, in fact, pick something up from what you see. Germain is a member of that generation of men no one knows that much about: “Silent guys expressing themselves through their work,” as Ouellet put it. “He talks about his sons to other people, more than to them.” What’s alarming then is Germain’s sudden urge to retire, to junk his truck — the brothers can’t get their heads around it.

Produced for close to $1.5 million, Camion opens with Germain and his old rig, hauling logs through the hills. The camera inspects the truck, how it’s loaded, the way Germain ties the logs down. Then — with a stuntman driving the druck at a remote-control car, driven by a following car — there is a bone-jarring impact and the car spins away, the truck jolting forward and off the shoulder. When the EMTs arrive, the camera inspects them, too — their equipment, their masks, the shield they use to protect the body of a stretcher from view. There’s no way to truly put the audience into Germain’s place, but Ouellet captures the shock of it.

The rest of the film stitches together smaller moments: Alain’s gentle harassment of Germain into keeping busy with chores, Alain and Samuel playing video games while Germain listens from his bed, Samuel’s excruciating, compulsive reunion with an old flame that ends with an epic bloody nose requiring an ER visit; Alain’s recounting of the beating that crippled his arm. They argue briefly, but being family don’t push it too far. The two sons go hunting with Germain, though it’s clear they aren’t hunters themselves. Alain takes it into his head to at least fix Germain’s old truck for him. Gradually, all three become unstuck, though you couldn’t say precisely what did it. There’s no determinative scene, no star-making monologue, no lacerating repartée.

What there is is a feeling of slapped-around humanity reviving itself. On their way down, Alain puts on Richmond Fontaine’s “I Fell into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona,” which he’s semi-translating for Samuel. It’s about how the house-painting crew boss would pick up Mexican day workers, promise them pay end of week, and then stiff them, picking up laborers from a new spot next week. The narrator says that while he’d never thought of himself as anything special — “I ain’t shit,” is specifically what he drawls — he knew better than that and quit. Alain is in raptures over this, replaying the line for his disinterested brother.

And it really is a line — one that marks the worth of a human being as a human being.