We are dedicating this year's Ebertfest to a friend and frequent festival guest, the late actor Scott Wilson, and you can read about it below. We are also celebrating Roger's television partner, Richard Roeper, and their career together. The films we are showing with those tributes are listed below.

Roger was very much a techie and would have loved the fact that we are bringing a V-R demonstration to Ebertfest that will give our audience a chance to experience ‘empathy’ through the lens of technology. The Virtual Reality Lab and Innovation Studio at the University of Illinois will set up equipment to allow us to put ourselves in the life situation of another. The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning will host these V-R demonstrations on the plaza outside of the Virginia Theatre in between films on Friday, April 12th, consisting of a series of short films that allows one's senses to “experience" border crossings, natural disasters or joyous occasions in other countries.

And, now I'm proud to present the full slate of films scheduled to screen at Ebertfest...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10

7:00 PM — "AMAZING GRACE"

Rather than conclude this year’s Ebertfest with a music-themed movie as we usually do, we are opening it on a glorious, gospel-infused high note, thanks to Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack’s recently restored 1972 documentary, “Amazing Grace.” It chronicles the two days in which the legendary Aretha Franklin returned to the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles and recorded the most successful gospel album in history. The footage sat in a Warner Bros. vault for 35 years before Elliott made it his mission to ensure the film’s release, a journey that took just over a decade. After its premiere in New York City last November, we are thrilled to be presenting the film at Ebertfest as it finally receives a theatrical release through NEON in the U.S. And we eagerly anticipate welcoming the Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir onstage at the Virginia Theater after the film. How glorious.

“This film is a powerful love letter to the Black Church, offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly yank of the arm for those who know—it drags you from the theater straight into the pews,” wrote our critic Odie Henderson in his four-star review. “It is profoundly moving and extraordinarily soothing. Nowadays we could use a good salve. To paraphrase another gospel standard, if we ever needed this film before, we sure do need it now.”

Special guests: director Alan Elliott and producer Tirrell D. Whittley; the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir will perform live on stage at the Virginia Theatre.