In April 2009, when I was just a freshman in college, I drove four hours across state lines to attend the Ebertfest Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, then in its eleventh year. I didn’t go for a starry premiere of the latest awards contender or to gawk at celebrities on the red carpet, but because a fellow journalist — then Roger Ebert‘s print editor at the Chicago Sun Times — was gracious enough to invite an aspiring film writer to meet other people and spend the weekend with a film-loving community.
Though I’ve never been able to return since, Ebertfest has always held a special place in my heart. The connections I made at Ebertfest indirectly contributed to me one day arriving in Los Angeles and getting accepted into grad school at USC. So it’s a shame to hear the news that the opportunities afforded by the festival could now be going away.
Last week, Roger Ebert’s widow and the publisher of RogerEbert.com Chaz Ebert announced that, after 26 years, Ebertfest’s run at the Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois would be coming to an end.
“Roger said that ‘movies are a machine that generates empathy and allows us to understand the lives of a person of a different age, race, gender, religion, or socio-economic class for two hours at a time’ and that kind of empathy remains much needed in our society to help us realize that we are all in this together,” Chaz Ebert wrote in her announcement.
For now, the festival is on “hiatus,” not gone.
Chaz Ebert, in speaking with IndieWire, said it’s better to say it’s “to be continued,” but she already knows she’s going to miss the festival as it was. The festival was put on each year in partnership with the university’s College of Media, and Ebert wrote that financial considerations facing both the festival and universities generally “have led us to the conclusion that there is not a clearly sustainable path for the festival in its present form.”
It’s hard to imagine how the festival might continue in a similar form if it winds up detached from Roger Ebert’s hometown and alma mater at U of I. Funding from the University of Illinois gave Ebertfest a tax exempt status, so losing that backing is a blow. Ebert said that the festival has already been approached by concerned locals who are trying to figure out funding, and relocating elsewhere is still a possibility. But Ebertfest’s homebase is at the Virginia Theater, a 1920s movie palace Ebertfest helped restore for this very occasion each year, so moving outside of Champaign-Urbana could be a tough sell.
“It seems to me it would not be right to move the festival to Boulder, for example,” Ebertfest festival director Nate Kohn told IndieWire. “But we are talking about possibilities. A lot of it is financial. If we could find the sponsors that come in to cover the amount of money the university was giving us, then we would happily continue the festival.”
Ebert said that they’re still processing what happened and are in an “incubator” before making any concrete decisions about what’s next. “When you devote 26 years of your life to something and it reaches a hiatus, or however you want to describe it, it’s not an insignificant thing,” she said. “I know that the community there in Champaign-Urbana is also trying to process what happened and what happens next.”
If you haven’t heard of Ebertfest during its 26-year history, that might because the festival has made no bones about trying to become the next Sundance or competing with even festivals to its north in Chicago.
The festival evolved from a screening in 1997 of “2001: A Space Odyssey” that celebrated the birthday of the supercomputer H.A.L., who famously was said to be “born” in 1997 in Urbana, Illinois. But Ebertfest has been around since 1999, first called the Overlooked Film Festival. Because he was concerned about a potential conflict of interest if he screened movies that he hadn’t reviewed yet, Roger Ebert decided to look back, not forward, and highlight what he deemed were some of his favorite, “overlooked” films from the year. He eventually changed the name to just “Ebertfest” when filmmakers said they didn’t want their films to be considered “overlooked.”
But those aren’t the only hallmarks that make Ebertfest unique among film festivals. Annually situated in late April way away from the hectic awards season, Ebertfest does not accept submissions, it screens a mix of indies, international films, unheralded blockbusters, and repertory screenings. Champaign-Urbana is also at least a good 2.5 hours south of the major O’Hare Airport, so the people who turn up are typically college students who attend the university, locals, and a lot of Midwestern film critics, writers, and Ebert acolytes.
Ebert, once upon a time, would take the Ebertfest crowd to hang out post-screenings at the local Steak ‘n’ Shake, Ebert’s favorite burger joint restaurant (think the Midwest’s version of In ‘n’ Out) that he literally owned stock in.
Over the years, Chaz Ebert has been able to invite filmmakers from all over the world to attend, and she’s even more honored that people are still showing up regularly and buying festival passes even before knowing what any of the films are going to be screened. Filmmakers like Ramin Bahrani and Jeff Nichols have shown up time and again, first because Ebert championed their work and now out of loyalty and love for the festival.
All that was certainly true when I went in 2009, shortly after Ebert lost his ability to speak. I attended a panel of critics that featured folks like the Sun Times’ Richard Roeper, the Chicago Tribune’s recently-bought out Michael Phillips, and WGN broadcaster Dean Richards, and I asked about how I can one day break into the industry as a critic. Moderator David Bordwell, the film historian and academic, would later blog about the panel and mentioned how he was encouraged that this group of seasoned, jaded newspaper and TV men actually encouraged me to become a journalist as opposed to finding a more lucrative career as a coal miner or something.
The films that year were just as eclectic. Guy Maddin showed up with “My Winnipeg,” as did Bahrani with what was just his second feature “Chop Shop.” A silent film screening of the Emil Jannings movie “The Lost Command” featured a live orchestra performance on a Friday afternoon, which preceded the Melissa Leo film “Frozen River.” And that Saturday had a stellar crop of crowd-pleasers, including Tarsem’s “The Fall,” the animated musical and released-for-free “Sita Sings the Blues,” Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth,” and the Scandinavian vampire classic “Let the Right One In.”
In the last few years, the festival has maintained the same modest proportions. This year, Francis Ford Coppola Zoomed in to present “Megalopolis,” but that’s about as big of a cameo as you’ll get, and Ebertfest still screened it at 9 a.m. on a Thursday. That such a festival has maintained its vision, community, and purpose more than a decade after Ebert’s death is a minor miracle.
“From the beginning, this film festival was a labor of love, both love for my husband Roger, love for the movies, love for the different, diverse people who came to the festival, the diverse filmmakers, but also just a love for humanity,” Chaz Ebert said.
Since Ebert’s death in 2013 (coincidentally, in April, just weeks before the year’s Ebertfest), Kohn said the festival has sold about 500 festival passes annually and also sells a number of individual tickets to locals every year. Before Ebert’s death, the festival was pulling in twice those number of passes, but Chaz Ebert and Kohn have soldiered on in honor of Roger’s legacy. They even considered ending it after a 25-year run, but they keep getting seduced by the festival’s charm.
While a number of options have been floated, Kohn is skeptical they can get anything achieved by next April in time for the ’26 festival as it would have been. It’s possible Ebertfest returns as a one-day event rather than a four-day festival, or it could return in some other form.
Whatever happens, he calls it a “tremendous loss” for the local community. “Every year with Chaz, the day or two after the festival, we say, ‘We’ve got to do another,’” Kohn said. “It’s just an important part of our lives, and we think it’s an important part of the life of the community in Champaign-Urbana. So I’d like to see it continue. We just have to get over this shock and see what we’re going to do and how we might conceivably move forward with it.”