Kuwabara likes to speak of the Lightbox as a “city of cinema,” a metaphor borne out by the building’s mixture of urbane touches and translucent exterior. It both mirrors and melds with the city it is part of. The first-floor café, which will have outdoor tables, flows directly into the central atrium, while the second-floor restaurant opens onto a wide avenue that on one side spills off onto a seating area, and on the other forks toward the theatres. In one of the structure’s most spectacular gestures, the fifth-floor elevator bank leads onto a bridge over a second atrium, with light washing up from windows on the fourth floor and onto a wide, green-carpeted boulevard toward TIFF’s magnificent open-concept office spaces, which look out on the city through a wall of windows that spans the length of the building. For Kuwabara, this should feel like a big city park. “I keep telling them they should get white lawn furniture,” he told me, laughing.

The idea throughout is to suggest cinema — specifically its hybrid of motion and vision. Moving through the building, whether circling the main atrium, or gliding along the panoramic windows of the TIFF offices, or tracking down an interior corridor toward one of the theatres, one is always aware of the city outside streaming in. At night, the Lightbox will glow from the inside, its visitors appearing from the street below as silhouettes on a screen. For them, the only refuge from the light will be within the theatres themselves.

Handling took over the reins of TIFF in 1994, after years as a film professor at Carleton and Queen’s universities, and then as a programmer for the Toronto festival. By then, it was already a prestigious event, serving as both a launching pad for new Canadian films and a nexus of global film culture. Under Handling’s direction, it has become the premier film festival in North America and arguably the world, presenting Academy Award–winning films such as American Beauty, and major works by significant and sometimes challenging international directors like Hungarian Béla Tarr and the Thai winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Handling’s success rests in part on his balance of seriousness and populism, on not alienating hard-core cineastes while bringing in ever-larger audiences and attracting corporate sponsors.

Most of the attendees swarming the red carpet events in the Lightbox’s atrium or the black-tie parties overlooking Toronto on the rooftop patio during the film festival this September probably won’t appreciate the allusion to Godard that so pleased Handling and Kuwabara. As a social phenomenon, the film festival can be a tad vapid: long ticket lines and packed theatres, roving media vans hunting for stray celebrities on Queen Street, patios congested with wannabe stars. The Lightbox is to an extent a way of lending TIFF year-round presence and gravitas. Whether it succeeds will hinge upon the programming, events, and exhibitions that take place after the parties are over and the beautiful people have gone home. Chief responsibility for conceptualizing and overseeing these will go to the Lightbox’s artistic director, Noah Cowan.

“There’s always been a kind of recruitment subtext when we get people to come to the film festival galas,” Cowan told me. “We want them to delve deeper into other offerings and to get interested in the language of cinema, not unlike museum-goers who start with the Mona Lisa and move on to Pollock.” He added, “The Bell Lightbox needs to trigger loyalties. Just being a film museum would be too limiting, since it evokes dusty costumes; on the other hand, being just a movie theatre would be a failure as well, because film has gone way beyond that.” The main objective, according to Cowan, is to provide multiple access points for visitors, and to that end the Lightbox will offer “exhibitions, youth-based workshops, lectures for adults, interactions with filmmakers, and performances” — as well as great films.

Cowan pointed out that the Art Gallery of Ontario was widely perceived to have lost steam after its Frank Gehry redesign opened two years ago. He wants to keep the momentum created by the film festival going through the fall and beyond. The first major Lightbox initiative will be Essential Cinema, a showing of the top hundred films of all time as voted on by TIFF’s in-house experts and other stakeholders. The idea combines the seriousness and populism Handling credits for the film festival’s success. Some acknowledged masterpieces will inevitably make the list, but there will also be films that might make rigorous cinephiles cringe. “Our larger strategic goal,” Cowan told me, “is to aggressively reinscribe film into the cultural world.”

The stairway above the Lightbox might be thought of as a metaphor for this vaulting ambition. From there, Handling looked out on the city as though he owned it, as though he were already in black tie, glass of champagne in hand. But Godard’s Contempt is an intensely ambivalent, melancholic film. By the time the filmmaker arrived on Capri, it was strewn with the ruined palaces of long-dead emperors, and the villa that housed the staircase had been abandoned for years. The success of the Lightbox, for all its uniqueness, is likewise far from assured. When I asked Handling what had inspired him, as a former academic and programmer, to undertake something this risky, and on this scale, he said, somewhat wistfully, “When I was younger, I looked to the British Film Institute and the Cinémathèque Française. It had always been a dream to create a space like that. We’re a big country, and we need a centre of excellenceat home.”