Expo 2020 Dubai’s incredible journey has been captured in a video telling the story of the world’s fair, with Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman’s famous voice narrating it.
The seven-minute video, released this week, shows highlights from Expo 2020, including the pavilions, celebrity appearances and some of its key events.
Click through the gallery above to see highlights from Expo 2020 Dubai's final day.
“How do you build the impossible?” Freeman says, at the start of the video.
“A city for humanity. A city for which there are no blueprints. A city to welcome the world,” he says. “The dream. But like all good stories, we should go back to the beginning.”
The video then shows scenes from Paris in 2013, when Dubai won the bid to host Expo 2020.
However, it also highlights the challenges organisers faced, brought about by the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020, six months before Expo was due to begin.
“But as that commitment was becoming a reality, our world as we knew it changed forever,” Freeman says.
“At a time when the world needed it most, we found a true moment of global solidarity.
“With an uncertain future, and a host of new challenges, the greatest hope we have is each other.”
The video features snippets from some of Expo’s 24 million visitors, as well as clips of appearances made by Cristiano Ronaldo, Lewis Hamilton, Alicia Keys and Coldplay.
See pictures of celerity appearances at Expo 2020 Dubai:
“As we say our last goodbyes, and head back to the places near and far we call home, we can reflect on the countless experiences we have shared here,” Freeman says.
“Over 20 million of us, from more countries than ever before, leave here united by a shared dream and bounded by a common purpose — every one of us changed by the realisation that ‘I can too’.
“We will build the future that we want for humanity.
“Expo City will live on as a permanent fixture of Dubai and as an enduring beacon of the city’s commitment to creating a future of opportunity, mobility and sustainability.”
Freeman is not the first Hollywood actor to feature in a video promoting Expo 2020 Dubai. Ahead of the world’s fair opening, Chris Hemsworth appeared in a promo video, made in partnership with Emirates.
The advertisement, which was directed by two-time Oscar-winning director Robert Stromberg, features the Thor star walking through a computer-generated version of the Expo 2020 site.
The song Pure Imagination, from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, is being sung by a children’s choir and reinterpreted by a 70-piece orchestra in the background.
