Mecca is Locked Down, But People’s Stories of the Muslim Holy Site Continue for Eid 2020

The end of the holy month of Ramadan marks the festival of Eid – an event celebrated by almost two billion Muslims around the globe. But, with 2020 being a year unlike any other, so were the festivities and events marking one of the more important days in the calendar.

A place that has known a lot of these festivities is Mecca in Saudi Arabia, which, this year, is under such complete lockdown that even those living in the country are unable to visit. To commemorate this FP7 McCann created the ‘Stories of Mecca’ campaign for travel platform Al Mosafer with the tagline: if people can’t travel to Mecca, their stories of Mecca can.

As production in Mecca was halted the team launched a campaign on social media during Ramadan inviting people to share their memories of visiting the holy site. People from over fifty countries contributed and the team were left with over 20 hours of stories to sift through. The end result is a 75-second montage collating the social media clips and a backdrop of music to show that despite being closed, the stories of Mecca will go on.