Dream home for film fest
Construction finally to begin early next year on Toronto Film Festival's complex of cinemas, museum, shop and condos
Aug. 24, 2006. 05:32 AM
MARTIN KNELMAN
It is taking two or three years longer than originally planned. But yesterday Piers Handling, CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, revealed some good news as he heads into the 31st edition of the annual festival opening Sept. 7.
The shovel will finally go into the ground during the first three months of 2007 to start building the festival's elusive new dream home over a parking lot at King and John Sts. It promises to make festival activities a year-round feature of downtown life, and dramatically increase the festival's economic impact.
"This is a historic moment for us," Handling says. "It may have taken us longer to nail down the details but we have a firm commitment from our development partner to start building in the first quarter of next year."
At the same time, Handling and Bruce Kuwabera, the lead architect on the project, released detailed images that provide a sense of what the building will look like and feel like both from the inside and the outside.
"The basic idea is that the building will be like a city of film," explains Kuwabera (of the firm KPMB), "emphasizing the cinematic play of light and shadow, with many different frames linked by bridges and alleys."
According to Kuwabera, the festival group's five-storey, 150,000-square-foot podium will be divided into two parts — the open public area on the lower three levels, and a closed office area on the upper two levels.
The ground level will be a dramatic lobby area suitable for receptions and media conferences, with an atrium extending to the top of the third level. The entry level also features a gallery large enough to house major film museum exhibits (such as a Hitchcock show from Paris that visited Montreal but not Toronto), as well as a retail shop stocked with film items and the festival's box office.
The second level will be dominated by three state-of-the-art screen rooms with 550 seats, 350 seats and 250 seats, along with a green room for guest talent.
Each cinema will have raked seating, and will be used for TIFF's Cinematheque Ontario programs, limited runs of specialty movies that do not have commercial distribution, and such annual Toronto film festivals as Hot Docs, the Gay and Lesbian festival and the Human Rights Watch festival.
The third level will have two smaller screening rooms with 150 seats and 80 seats.
The Film Reference Library will be placed on the fourth level, with most of the office space on the fifth floor.
Kuwabera has designed two separate atriums — a light-filled one on the top two levels, and a darker, more Film Noirish one on the lower three levels.
Above the podium: 37 storeys of luxury condo apartments being built by the festival's development partners, The Daniels Corp., in collaboration with Hollywood producer Ivan Reitman, whose family had owned the parking lot for decades.
Sales of the condo units are being launched on Sept. 8 with what is being billed as "an Inner Circle red carpet event" on the patio at Roy Thomson Hall. Prospective buyers for the 400 units have been wooed with the slogan "Get the star treatment."
The marketing campaign for the condos emphasizes they're ideal for people who want to live in a never-ending film festival.
Handling's development department still has a long way to go to reach its target of raising $196 million (which includes an endowment fund). The festival's share of the building cost is $129 million. So far it has raised $132 million, including $25 million each from the federal government and the Ontario government and more than $30 million from Bell, whose deal includes naming rights for the building.
That is enough to get the building started but the festival needs to raise at least $64 million more between now and 2009.
Yesterday Handling announced two new gifts: $1 million from Toronto broadcasting tycoon Allan Slaight, and $500,000 from BMO. The biggest naming opportunity up for grabs is the largest of the five cinemas — which is worth $10 million or more.
The target completion date has been put back to the 2009 Toronto film festival, three years later than planned when the project was announced in 2003.
Still, Handling feels confident he will have the last laugh, defying naysayers who predicted this building would never go up.
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