Ailing Ebert will attend festival

Roger Ebert plans to attend his annual festival for overlooked movies tonight, returning to public view for the first time since having cancer surgery.

The 64-year-old film critic had surgery June 16 to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland. He also had emergency surgery July 1 after a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation.

A tracheostomy was done, meaning Ebert cannot speak.

Ebert will watch the ninth annual Overlooked Film Festival, which begins tonight at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from the audience.

In a column in Tuesday’s Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote that friends were worried about unflattering photos of him being taken and unkind comments being written. He wrote that he doesn’t care. “We spend too much time hiding illness,” he said.