The Brooklyn Rail

On the right of the image are a legion of of police officers, donning black, full-body riot gear, standing with backs straight and batons in hands; on the left, plainclothed people sit on the ground, facing the dark mass in what appears to be a busy downtown area, some with clinical masks on, some have a hood or a cap, most bare-faced and bare-headed, a few striking a peace sign with one hand and with the other holding a protest sign, the center of which—above the slogan “the people have spoken”—features three giant letters in strikethrough: “WTO.”

Swap out these three letters for another three, ICE, and the image could easily be mistaken for a snapshot from Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, or Washington, D.C. in 2025. Swap for another three letters, GZA or BDS, and take out the strikethrough, and the image could be recognized for many of the same cities and more in 2024, especially New York City.

But the image in question is Seattle, and the year was 1999. The causes of action were fair trade, labor rights, environmental protection, and democratic processes, and the target of protest was the World Trade Organization. Taking place over four days beginning November 30, 1999, the WTO ministerial conference drew nearly fifty thousand protesters across a broad coalition—environmentalists, labor organizers, anarchists, clergy, students, artists, anti-sweatshop advocates, and conservative politicians—from all over the nation to voice their objection against the nature and existence of the organization.

Few recollections of this event exist today outside of history blogs or the deep crease of memories of an older generation of progressive activists. Even for the progressive-minded young people attuned to American political history, including those who grew up in 2000s Seattle, the Battle of Seattle was barely known. Ian Bell’s documentary WTO/99 thus becomes a revelation. Built from roughly a thousand hours of archival footage—over four-hundred of which were never-before-seen—the documentary reconstructs the pivotal events and atmosphere of those four days with great journalistic rigor and narrative detail that covers the events almost minute-by-minute from police archives, public media footage, and recordings from hundreds of individual protesters. Besides a fantastic, comprehensive, and important audio-visual historical document that charts the intellectual and emotional contours of the largest anti-globalization protests the US has ever seen, the film is an extraordinary cinematic and archival achievement with few ready titles for direct comparison.

Since the film’s theatrical premiere at DCTV in New York last December, much has been said and written about the film by mainstream and smaller alternative media. After failing to secure the commitment of a distributor or streaming network, the team decided to continue their DIY theatrical run. A formidable and surprisingly successful operation—largely run by Alex Megaro, the film’s co-producer and co-editor—the film has screened at over three dozen locations nationwide, not counting festival screenings, with a dozen more secured up to early May. According to Megaro, the screenings have enacted a “four-pronged” plan consisting of direct booking with regular theaters, university screenings, activist groups, as well as a double-screening program—along with Hello Dankness (2022)—pitched to more idiosyncratic, usually smaller theaters. For a free benefit screening supporting the Minneapolis-based mutual aid group Neighbors Helping Neighbors in late February at Riverview Theater, the film helped raise over $10,000 by the time of the screening.

The guerrilla-style approach Megaro takes to distribution perfectly mirrors the ethos of both the film’s subject matter and its production methods. Opening with camcorder footage of a group of protestors gathering equipment in preparation for the protest, the film proceeds with clips from a police department training program that shows officers talking about the significance of the upcoming WTO conference and security guidelines. A creative challenge the filmmakers took on and made work was structuring the film in faithful chronology of the events as they unfolded. This partially explains why half of the film features actions on the first day, which saw an almost immediate escalation in the early morning by the police when they decided to deploy pepper spray and force on the protestors—who, except for one incident when a man tries to climb atop a tactical truck, are peaceful. If the tactics the police officers employed look familiar today, it certainly was unusual at the time—as one protestor comments behind the camera while the camcorder zooms in on the riot police pulling into the streets, “Aren’t they a little overdressed?”

In many ways, the Battle of Seattle has foreboded much of what was to happen in the first quarter of twenty-first-century America: the restrictions on civil liberties, the immediacy and intensity of police control on nonviolent protests, and the complicity of national media outlets in perpetuating official talking points without a good-faith engagement with people protesting on the ground. When an on-air anchor describes the protesters as “disorganized” and “disoriented” as to why they were even protesting, Megaro and Bell follow that up immediately with the reality on the ground that directly contradicts broadcast news. This ability to not only repackage and preserve historical moments but also draw conclusions from mere presentation is one of the most distinct and powerful tools of found-footage filmmaking.

The film’s most striking achievement lies in its immersive qualities. Eschewing voice-over and music completely, the film collapses the distance between viewers and the event in a way that is more often associated with narrative fiction than documentary—the result of a clear vision and two and a half years of dedication to sifting through and carefully labeling, organizing, and trying different timeline arrangements of the footage. In a stunning sequence in the still-tranquil hours of the protest, a camcorder shot of a bunch of police is followed with a reverse shot of the filming protester and his friend from the officer’s perspective. Megaro and Bell resist the urge to impose coherence where there was none, allowing instead for the contradictions, digressions, and frictions of the protests to surface in real time. One protester, speaking candidly into the camera, declares that the hope is “the end of global trade and of government,” before laughing and conceding he would “settle for, uh, nothing less than revolution.” Elsewhere, a man with neon purple hair worries aloud that acts of sabotage—slashing tires—are “too much” that could provoke the type of police violence the protesters set out to prevent and resist. What emerges then is not simply a record of protest, but a textured, decentralized social space.

A subtle pleasure of the film comes from seeing the involvement of well-known figures in their younger days, such as a dark-haired Jello Biafra, Bill Clinton, and also Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders, whose looks somehow seem to never have changed. There are some other moments when we realize how much things have changed, such as when we hear a protestor shouting across the street to demand an officer’s badge number, and the officer responding in a measured, almost pedagogical cadence, each digit enunciated with care, followed by a brief back-and-forth as the numbers are repeated, corrected, and confirmed. Multiple protesters also share stories of support from the local officers, which altogether complicates the assumed antagonism between the two sides, further showing the mass support of the anti-globalization sentiments of the American people at the turn of the century. In retrospect, those protestors were absolutely right about the trajectory: that neoliberalism’s internal failures would not correct themselves, but metastasize—fueling backlash, hardening state power, and clearing the ground for the far more punitive, nationalist, and openly reactionary politics that define the present.