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The Little Italy Open Air Film Festival, a Baltimore summertime tradition since 1999, will not take place this summer, organizers announced Saturday.

“I have just learned that there will not be a film fest for 2018,” Suzanna Rosa Molino, director of the Promotion Center for Little Italy, said in an email Saturday morning.

For almost two decades, outdoor films had been shown on Friday nights in a parking lot of Da Mimmo Restaurant at High and Stiles streets, projected from a home across the street.

Last month, organizers announced that the festival, for its upcoming 20th season, would be moving to a new location, in a parking lot of Stratford University. Mary Ann Cricchio, owner of Da Mimmo and one of the festival’s original organizers, said she no longer spends summers in Baltimore and could not take on the responsibility of running the festival.

A new committee had been organized to run the festival, Molino said last month, adding that “it is hopeful that the event will seem new and improved, bigger and better.”

On Saturday, however, a post on the promotion center’s website read, “under new potential management, every effort was made to continue this summer tradition, however, the expense and the challenges were high and, unfortunately, the event was unable to be properly planned for 2018.”

The post did not say whether there are plans for the festival to return in 2019.

ckaltenbach@baltsun.com

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