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Venice Film Festival to start a week later in 2009

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-09 09:49

The Venice Film Festival is pushing its annual calendar by a week next year to avoid the traditional holiday rush in Italy.

The world's oldest film festival will run September 2-12 next year _ starting a week later than usual. Film festival director Marco Mueller announced the new schedule at a closing news conference on the Lido on Sunday.

He says one of the reasons for the change is to avoid the Italian vacation month of August. The new dates could pose a conflict with the Toronto film festival.

This year's Toronto festival started September 4. This year's Venice Film Festival closed on Saturday with a Golden Lion to Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler."