Chiwetel Ejiofor has signed up to narrate Day Zero, a documentary film about the global water shortage crisis.

The film will feature footage recorded all over the world across 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, who told Deadline: "It started dawning on me that you could make a documentary movie that is scientifically important, but also entertaining enough so people could understand these trends on Earth."

His co-director Kevin Sim added: "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 our 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. We’re trying to do something about it.”

It's not too hard to see why Ejiofor 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 nonprofit dedicated to ending poverty, fighting inequality, and halting climate change.

Ejiofor is currently in London shooting Lockdown, a heist movie-slash-romantic comedy movie co-starring Anne Hathaway. Earlier this week the film added Sir Ben Kingsley, Mindy Kaling, and Bohemian Rhapsody's Lucy Boynton to its cast.

Are you looking forward to hearing Chiwetel Ejiofor narrate Day Zero?