Oscar-nominated 12 Years a Slave actor  Chiwetel Ejiofor (1990) will be narrating Day Zero, a documentary film about the global water shortage crisis which will feature footage recorded all across the world over a three-year period, including reports from Cape Town, South Africa, which nearly ran out of water in 2018. The impact of intensive farming in the American Midwest and widespread deforestation in the Amazon will also be explored.

Day Zero is a passion project for David Wallerstein of tech giant Tencent and it started dawning on him that you could make a documentary movie that is scientifically important, but also entertaining enough so people could understand these trends on Earth.

The scientific message is distilled through the experience of people who have turned the tap on and have found no water, or the people trying to find why it is not raining. The people in the film have first-hand experience of a terrible catastrophe that’s creeping up on everybody but we live in a world that believes they are crying wolf.

It’s not too hard to see why Chiwetel has been attracted to the project. Last year he made his feature film directorial debut with The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a rousing movie about William Kamkwamba, the Malawian schoolboy who transformed the lives of a community by building electric windmills out of junk to supply running water to his village. He has also worked with charities including Global Goals, a

Chiwetel is currently in London shooting Lockdown, a heist movie-slash-romantic comedy movie co-starring Anne Hathaway.