DOCUMENTARIES A GRATIS GLOBAL SERVICE
⌕ SEARCH GRATIS GLOBAL ↗
DOCUMENTARIES
The Dark Side of the London Olympics
SOURCE: YOUTUBE · NO TRACKING UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY · TROUBLE PLAYING? WATCH AT THE SOURCE ↗

The Dark Side of the London Olympics

12 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
RATE THIS

London's bid for the 2012 Olympics promised urban regeneration for the city's poorer east end, and this VICE report goes to find out who actually benefited. Cameras visit the Carpenter's Estate, where residents faced eviction to clear ground for the Games, and follow some of them to their new homes in Stoke, well outside the city their displacement was supposed to improve. The film sets that story against the public mood around the Olympics itself, including the ping-pong tournament that Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, rebranded as "wiff-waff" and turned into a minor media event. The contrast is the point: a global spectacle promoted as a gift to East London, and a group of residents who experienced it as a forced move to somewhere else entirely. There's no narrator smoothing over the gap between the two; the estate footage and interviews with displaced tenants are left to speak for themselves against the celebratory coverage happening a few miles away.