Steven Keen

A deeply personal mission

Steven Keen wrote, directed, and produced Fisher of Kids. The film took him to the heart of Lake Volta, to tell the true story of James Kofi Annan alongside the very communities the story belongs to.

It was never made to simply be watched. It was made to make a difference: to put the children of Lake Volta in front of audiences and decision-makers who could help, and to raise awareness and support for the organizations doing the work on the ground. Years on, it continues to do exactly that.

“It shows that freedom can be achieved—
and the difference one single person can make.” — Diane Mull, International Initiative to End Child Labor (2013)

The craft, and the cause

Fisher of Kids was made in partnership with the International Human Rights Group and the International Initiative to End Child Labor, with the support of the Welsh Livery Guild, the Emily Sandall Foundation, as well as the Goethe-Institut, and with music by none other than Jason Mraz. It premiered in Accra, at the Hay Festival, and in Washington, D.C., on World Day Against Child Labour—and screened as an Official Selection on the global festival circuit. Today, Fisher of Kids is held in the archives of the UN’s International Labour Organization.

The questions the film forced him to sit with—who profits from a place, who pays for it, and what outsiders owe the people whose story it is—never left him. From a mountain village on Crete, Steven now writes and researches responsible tourism, ethical tourism, and inclusive tourism, and the travel that asks more of the traveler—soft travel, regenerative tourism, and transformational tourism: he is completing an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and holds professional certification from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) and the International Centre for Responsible Tourism (ICRT). It is the same conviction that made Fisher of Kids—that the way we move through the world, and the stories we tell about it, should leave people better than we found them. If that work interests you, he writes Letter from Crete once a month—one letter, no selling.

Where this authority ends

He was on Lake Volta in 2012 and made the film, so on the film—its making, its partners, its premieres, its intent—he is the first-hand source. He is not Ghanaian, not a survivor of trafficking, and not a child-protection researcher. On the scale and prevalence of the crisis he reports other people’s research and adds nothing to it; on James Kofi Annan’s life the authorities are James Kofi Annan himself and the organizations that have documented him. Read the site accordingly: first-party on the film, carefully secondary on everything else. The one place his own observation is the source is what he saw on the lake in 2012, and it is marked as such.

This site sells nothing and is not a donation channel: nothing here takes a payment, and donations go to Challenging Heights directly. It names one survivor—James Kofi Annan, who tells his story publicly—and no other individual child.