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The Toronto International Film Festival will spend the next seven or eight months focusing fundraising efforts on reaching the $130-million capital-cost goal for its new headquarters in downtown Toronto, according to TIFF CEO Piers Handling.

Handling made the comment Thursday after a ceremony at the headquarters site, where Ontario's Deputy Premier and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman and Culture Minister Aileen Carroll announced a $10-million capital investment by the McGuinty government in TIFF's home, the Bell Lightbox.

Construction of the Lightbox, which started in 2007, is scheduled to be completed in late April next year. Thursday's announcement, in fact, coincided with the last concrete “pour” for the five-storey building. Parts of the structure are expected to be ready for use by the time the festival's 2010 edition begins. The full facility is scheduled to be operational the following November when it hosts a major 51/2-month-long retrospective of U.S. filmmaker Tim Burton, organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art, that will include more than 700 artifacts from such films as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.

At yesterday's announcement, Handling said that the province's $10-million investment leaves TIFF just $21-million short of its Lightbox fundraising goal. “It feels like it's actually within reach,” he declared, while promising unspecified “exciting philanthropic updates” in the months ahead.

However, as he acknowledged after the presentation, the overall fundraising objective for the Lightbox remains $196-million, including not just the capital cost but the more than $65-million it hopes to raise for an endowment to help pay operating expenses. Even with yesterday's $10-million injection, TIFF's Bell Lightbox Campaign Committee is still charged with raising close to $50-million more.

For the time being, Handling said, “we're really going to concentrate on the capital portion and hope to have it raised, more or less, by the time we're in the building.” He added that he expects the public phase of the Lightbox's fundraising campaign to begin at the end of March, 2010.

In addition to the Tim Burton exhibition, Lightbox artistic director Noah Cowan said TIFF is planning to start an ambitious, long-running program next fall called The Essential 100, devoted to both the best and most influential movies in the 120-year history of the cinema. This will include not only film screenings but guest speakers, seminars, special events and exhibitions of props, costumes, storyboards and other paraphernalia associated with the essential 100.

There are, in fact, two essential 100s the Lightbox has drawn on for the program, which is expected to unspool over an estimated 16 months. One was prepared by five TIFF curators (including Cowan and Handling), the other by a survey earlier this year of 2,000 TIFF “stakeholders” – filmmakers, donors, journalists and moviegoers. The curators' number-one choice was Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc while the stakeholders went with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, from 1941. (By comparison, Kane ranked 15th on the “expert” list, and Joan was 48th on the stakeholders')

Cowan also announced that Bell Lightbox would be the permanent home of the Rob Brooks Mary Pickford Collection. Amassed over 30 years by Brooks, a Toronto film buff, the collection contains almost 2,000 objects – posters, lobby cards, memorabilia and personal items among them – associated with “America's Sweetheart” who, as film buffs know, was in fact born in Toronto in 1892 near what is now the city's Hospital for Sick Children.