Celebrating Daniel Aklilu Demissie

Dan was a great friend of those chasing the Chain Ferry Challenge, and many others besides.  He was funny, kind, intellectually curious, and also brilliantly talented.  In his all-to-short professional career, he produced two remarkable films.

Town of Runners (2012) follows the story of young athletes from Bekoji, a village in Ethiopia that has most probably produced more Olympic gold medals per head of population than any other settlement on Earth.  Amongst those born there are some of history's greatest long distance runners, including Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba.

The School in The Cloud (2018) is an extremely prescient reflection on the future of education.  The theme is explored through following the experiences of children in the remote village of Korakati in the Ganges Delta, as they encounter the internet for the first time.

A passage in Dan's eulogy in 2019 brought to mind a funny conversation once held with him.  Dan enjoyed the quirky and the ridiculous.  Late in our school days, we were on the chain ferry in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, laughing about what an obscure mode of transport it was.  We joked that we would become the first chain ferry entrepreneurs of the modern era.  In the mould of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, we would lay a transatlantic cable to link London and New York in just twenty weeks.

For reasons both good and bad, that wasn't to be.  We think he would have loved the whimsicality of the Chain Ferry Challenge though.  It will be a celebration of Dan, and in chasing it we hope to raise a lot of money in his memory.