Friday, November 12: 4:30 pm Linder Theater

Swiss artist Ernst Aebi made his name in the 1970s with his intricate pen-and-ink drawings. He made his money renovating lofts in downtown New York. His notoriety came when he tried to rebuild a town in Mali. Along the route of the Paris-to-Dakar off-road race, Araouane used to be an oasis of more than 100 wells, where nomads and traders stopped off to refresh water supplies during their trans-Saharan crossings. When Aebi came in 1989, it had been buried by the shape-shifting dunes, its people basically living underground and its wells collapsing. Twenty years later, Swiss filmmaker Martina Egi joins the peripatetic Aebi on a trip to Araouane to check on the condition of the town, along the way trying to uncover what makes the great man tick.