Courtesy The Associated Press By HILLEL ITALIE

TORONTO (AP) - Schedule 320 movies over a 10-day period and you're going to end up with some unfortunate choices. The directors of this year's Toronto International Film Festival discovered that when they had to book a public screening of the Israeli film ``Kadosh'' for Saturday morning.

Two problems:

Saturday mornings are part of the Jewish Sabbath, a time of rest and of worship.

And this Saturday is part of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.

``It's unfortunate, but there's nothing that could be done,'' said Hussein Awarshi, owner of Mongrel Media, the movie's Canadian distributor.

Each film at the Toronto festival, which runs Sept. 9-18, gets two public showings and programmers try to place them a couple of days apart. To accommodate the schedule of director Amos Gitai, who was to make an appearance, the first screening ran Thursday night.

Saturday morning was the only other possible time for the second show.

``We were very conscious of the problems with running it on Saturday, but Amos Gitai was only going to be in town a few days and this is what we had to do,'' said the festival's associate director of programming, Noah Cowan. ``We triple-checked with the filmmakers and they told us it was OK.''

Gitai, it turns out, didn't even make the screening. After arriving earlier Thursday, he quickly fell ill and flew right back home.

``Kadosh,'' which is Hebrew for ``sacred,'' is hardly a celebration of Orthodox Jewish values. The third of a trilogy of films by Gitai about Israeli life, ``Kadosh'' is set in a highly religious neighborhood and openly criticizes the treatment of women. Gitai has called his film a statement against that country's religious right.

Meanwhile, Cowan ran into a problem scheduling another controversial movie, ``Dogma.'' Kevin Smith's satire of Christianity - rock star Alanis Morissette plays God - already has been criticized by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights as ``clearly designed to degrade and denigrate the Catholic culture.'' The film's original U.S. distributor, the Disney-owned Miramax Films, ended up selling rights to Lions Gate Films.

A press screening was scheduled for Saturday morning, with public screenings on Saturday night and Monday. But the distributors wanted the media to see ``Dogma'' with an audience first and asked that the press showing be re-scheduled.

The only possible time? Sunday morning.

AP-NY-09-10-99 1638EDT