Thursday Cinema
What Have You Done
Today Mervyn Day?
Seven Summers

SALT Galata, Auditorium

What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2005)
Director: Paul Kelly
46 minutes
English; Turkish subtitles

Electronic indie music trio Saint Etienne and director Paul Kelly collaborate on this film commissioned by Barbican Centre. A documentary with additional fictional characters introduced, the film follows paperboy Mervyn Day on his round. It traces the fascinating hidden history of East London’s Lower Lea Valley right before London won the 2012 Olympics bid, which opened way for the area’s redevelopment.

Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley wrote in July 2012: “The 2012 architects recently gave a talk at the London School of Economics; all of them were at pains to point out how much the legacy of the Olympics had been an issue, and how the buildings in the park would all either be open to the community or recycled elsewhere. What no one even once referred to was the area’s history. It seems extraordinarily sad that this stretch of east London had been brutalized for hundreds of years in order to provide us with petrol and plastic – the tools of modern Britain – and there was nothing at all to remember this.”


Seven Summers (2012)
Director: Paul Kelly
10 minutes
English; Turkish subtitles

This short documentary is a follow-up on electronic indie music trio Saint Etienne and director Paul Kelly’s film What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day?. It revisits the Lower Lea Valley area in 2012 to investigate how wholesale redevelopment for the 2012 Olympics has affected local residents and the skyline of east London. Using previously unseen footage of the industrial wasteland on which the Olympic park has been built, as well as new footage of a complex landscape, Seven Summers finds an area seemingly caught in a constant state of flux.


Part of the Thursday Cinema program supported by Garanti Mortgage, the screening is organized in cooperation with the British Council. Program is free. Reservations are not accepted.