The arduous, lengthy, and expensive quest to name the Bell Festival Centre is over. The Star described the process for finding a new moniker for the home of the Toronto International Film Festival Group in dramatic terms: "[it] has gone on for years," wrote Martin Knelman, "involving high-priced consulting firms and a committee of board members and gurus, climaxing with a think-tank meeting at a retreat in Cambridge, Ont."

No small feat, then, determining the name. And the decision this morning, the culmination of the work of those years, those high-priced consulting firms and gurus and board members and think-tanks? The Bell Lightbox, a name that sounds more like the latest piece of Adobe software (with a software-y logo to go with it) than a proper name for a building.

The building itself has an awkward design to go with its awkward name, all weird rectangles shoved on top of other weird rectangles––maybe calling it a "box" isn't so incorrect, then. In the end, TIFF's new home comes off as more of a strange but boring five-storey condo or some overdesigned mega-club than the headquarters for a company that wants to be world-renowned for the art it curates. Nonetheless, they're still shoving a thousand-storey condo––Festival Tower––on top of it anyway.

See more renderings after the jump.

As you surely know, the Toronto International Film Festival is rapidly approaching, now just ten days away. The Toronto International Film Festival Group have offered us one Canadian Retrospective ticket package to give away to a lucky winner––a $65 dollar value containing tickets for six screenings featuring nine Michel Brault films.

Michel Brault’s work as a cinematographer and director runs the spectrum from a documentary on whale hunting (Pour La Suite Du Monde) to a story about a man who leaves his small village to fulfill his dream of becoming a folk singer in Montreal (Entre La Mer Et L'eau Douce, pictured above). The retrospective includes Les Ordres, which won him the Best Director's Award at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.

The full list of films included in the package: L'acadie, L'acadie?!?, Chronique D'un Été, Entre La Mer Et L'eau Douce, Geneviève, La Lutte, Les Noces De Papier, Les Ordres, Pour La Suite Du Monde and Les Raquetteurs.

In order to win this contest, simply enter your name and email address in the form below. The contest ends at midnight on Sunday, September 2nd, and we'll let the winner know on Monday, September 3rd.

The contest has now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered.

Out of respect for the funeral of Richard Bradshaw, the Toronto International Film Festival Group chose not to hold their traditional big final press conference in Nathan Phillips Square yesterday, and so with slightly less fanfare than usual we received a massive lump of press releases from the Festival announcing that they’ve announced absolutely everything about the festival there is to announce, pretty much.

So what does that entail? Well, in the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival there will be a grand total of 349 films from 55 countries, with 275 feature/mid-length films. Eighy-five percent are world, international or North American premieres, and 71 are directorial debuts.

Six new Gala presentations have been announced, including Renny Harlin's Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson; Robin Swicord's The Jane Austen Book Club; Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth, starring Michael Caine and Jude Law; and Paul Schrader's The Walker, starring Woody Harrelson.

Mavericks presentations include Everything to Gain: A Conversation with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, themselves the focus of Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man From Plains, playing as part of Special Presentations. Special Presentations also includes Michael Moore’s Captain Mike Across America, Jason Reitman’s Juno and Brian De Palma’s Redacted.

Two films from Wayne Wang about the experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States, A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers and The Princess Of Nebraska , screen as part of the Masters programme.

Dialogues includes Ken Loach presenting Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains and Max von Sydow presenting Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. Reel To Reel has become more musical than ever with the addition of Paul Crowder and Murray Lerner's Amazing Journey: The Story Of The Who, Julian Schnabel's Lou Reed's Berlin, and Grant Gee's Joy Division. Excellent.

Ticket passes and packages for the Festival are now on sale, with Gala and Visa Screening Room tickets on sale on August 25 at 10 a.m. All other tickets will be sale on Wednesday, September 5 at 7 a.m.

The Toronto International Film Festival have announced 73 films today, which is, er, a lot. Too many for us to even pretend to give them even coverage, so as usual we’re just going to pick and choose from today’s announcements, which are made of films from international filmmakers, and tell you about the ones that interest us personally.

Gala Presentations gains Blood Brothers, the debut of director Alexi Tan. Produced by John Woo, it’s a tale of corruption and crime in Shanghai in the 1930’s.

Special Presentations includes Chacun Son Cinéma, 33 shorts from 33 directors including David Cronenberg, David Lynch and Wong Kar Wai, originally commissioned for Cannes’ 60th Anniversary. Also part of the Special Presentations: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai’s Mad Detective and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis (pictured above).

Masters this year includes Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World… and Takeshi Kitano’s Glory To The Filmmaker! which seems to be a sort of continuation of the themes seen in his last film at the festival, Takeshis’, as he plays himself, “on a quest to produce a box-office hit.”

Contemporary World Cinema has a similarly inward looking film, Erik Nietzsche The Early Years. Apparently written by Lars Von Trier under the nom-de-plume Erik Nietzsche, it’s a semi-autobiographical film following a shy young man that enrolls in the Danish National Film School. Other films include Battle For Haditha by Nick Broomfield, Run, Fat Boy, Run, starring Simon Pegg and David Schwimmer (Yep, that David Schwimmer) and Enrique Fernandes and César Charlone’s The Pope’s Toilet.

Also announced were a few films for the Visions and Vanguard programmes, including Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Pang Ho-cheung’s The Exodus and Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, which excellently features “a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator who falls for a Marilyn Monroe look-alike.”

Another spate of announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival, with in particular an entirely new programme announced, Future Projections. To feature installations, interactive film projects, and other film-related art work presented outside the cinema space and throughout the City of Toronto, it’s to work as a companion to the Wavelengths programme. Eight of the nine multimedia installations will be offered as free, non-ticketed events, with entry to the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery offered free to Festival passholders/ticketholders for the duration of the Festival, and free to the general public on Wednesdays from 5 p.m.–8 p.m.

The programme includes works such as Ryan Sluggett's Tyranny (a pendulum with a speaker swings above three floor-mounted monitors, each presenting animated video composed from over 5,000 digital stills) and Darfur/Darfur, an exhibit of digitally projected images depicting life and genocide in Darfur. Our interest is particularly piqued, however, by the Toronto premiere of the Into the Pixel exhibition, which is to feature 32 pieces of artwork from the last two years of video games. It will be taking place throughout the festival in the Great Hall at Ontario College of Art & Design.

It’s nice to see the Toronto International Film Festival take a greater interest in mediums other than film—particularly video games—in order to highlight their artistic and cultural relevance. Roger Ebert won’t be pleased, but Torontoist hopes they continue to increase the role of multimedia in the festival.

Back to film, they’ve also announced some new Discovery titles, including David Ross' The Babysitters (featuring John Leguizamo), Rodrigo Plà’s La Zona, and Paprika Steen’s With Your Permission, as well as some new Visions titles, including Lee Myung-se's M and Rolf de Heer's Dr. Plonk.

Image: Speed Architecture: AG Systems—NanoGraff Squares by Rita Linsley (from Wipeout Pure).