As I confront TIFF number 25, I admit to a strong ambivalence. The coming onslaught of movies is welcome, but less so the attendant explosion of self-importance. Our era’s cult of personal celebrity is bad enough, but in a few days everyone from doormen to waitresses to party publicists and party crashers will be moving levers of petty control. There’s nothing like show business to bring the prick out of anyone.

Which is why it was thrilling to wander through the growing citadel that will be the Bell Lightbox. Finally, Toronto will have a year-round film center to take the pressure off those 10 days in September.

As Lightbox artistic director Noah Cowan pointed out on a recent tour of the facility, the new building will provide not just a focus for film culture in Toronto but a home for Toronto’s filmmakers. It will be a place to screen cast-and-crew films, and student projects. The (insert naming rights here) Canadian Film Heritage Gallery will finally open up the trove of homegrown treasures TIFF has accumulated over the 20 years since the Film Reference Library began acquiring private collections of filmmakers.

The move downtown from the faux Beverly Hills that is Yorkville can’t happen soon enough. There are no traffic jams of leased Lamborghinis at King and John. The fashion tends less toward $500 blue jeans and more towards Mountain Equipment Co-op fleece. Lightbox is in the center of Toronto’s media milieu, a block from the CBC, two blocks from CTV. It’s waydowntown.

Cowan says TIFF is in conversation with the city’s other film festivals (there’s practically one in progress every week of the year) about using Lightbox as their venue. Similarly, Cowan envisions a reciprocal relationship between the film center and Toronto’s cosmopolitanism. Imagine the Chinese community getting behind a retrospective of Chinese cinema or a Bollywood festival that is curated so that the rest of us can get with the groove.

Not to detract from the work done by the Canadian Film Centre, but its distance from the heart of the city has a direct impact on its relevance in the city’s cultural life. It’s not here, in your face. Lightbox’s main cinemas sit on a bed of rubber pucks to dampen the sound of passing streetcars.

From Rio de Janeiro to Berlin, I’ve been blown away by the sophistication of urban cinemas, with cafes and bars and bookstores attached, creating a cross-cultural buzz. You can actually hear people speak. The food is not just edible but tempting. The coffee comes in a cup with a saucer. Toronto’s version is the space geek heap that is Cineplex’s Scotiabank multiplex, a concept aimed at persons with a literal or mental age in the single digits. Any adult worthy of the term has no choice but to sprint for the exits as soon as the credits roll.

The Lightbox promises to be civilized. A place where grown-ups will want to hang out. Like the ROM or the AGO, Lightbox will have a street presence, a restaurant, a bar with a terrace. Cowan says architect Bruce Kuwabara is a master of minimalism, so presumably it will have an actual interior design and neither lasers nor a disco ball.

Bless the Cinematheque Ontario, but Jackman Hall, the AGO theater that has been the Cinematheque’s home since its inception, has lousy seats and not enough rake. Lightbox’s main cinemas have a graded rake, rising from auditorium to stadium-style. The seats will be comfortable.

Then there’s the gallery space – up to 5,000 square feet – so that the city can attract touring cinema shows like the ones on Kubrick and Hitchcock that passed us by.

Toronto is enjoying a renaissance in its bricks-and-mortar cultural institutions: a new home for the opera and the ballet, an expanded and reinvented ROM and AGO. But of all the cultural palaces that have been born or reborn in the 25 years I’ve lived in Toronto, this is the one I most anticipate.

The news that the Ontario government has given TIFF another $10 million towards its $49 million shortfall means that there are still $39 million more to be raised.

If they start selling naming rights on the water fountains let me know.