In late November and early December 1999, the World Trade Organization convened in Seattle for a round of conferences and negotiations. Tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets to meet them, including labor activists alarmed by the post-NAFTA landscape of the US, as well as environmentalists dismayed at eroding standards of ecological care under the kinds of agreements the WTO was arranging. They in turn encountered a police response more vicious than many anticipated, particularly once the protests threatened to shut down the conference.
What came to be known as the “Battle in Seattle” was a touchstone for the brief era that we now think of as the “End of History.” The derisive media reaction—The New York Times falsely reported that protestors threw Molotov cocktails at the police, spurring the crackdown—was characteristic of the time. What did anyone have to really be angry at? All the numbers showed that the economy was doing great! The best emblem of the response to the WTO protests comes from an episode of The West Wing that came out a little more than a year after the events. In season 2’s "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail,” White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler watches an anti-WTO protest in disgust and monologues:
It’s activist vacation, is what it is. Spring break for anarchist wannabes. The black T-shirts, the gas masks as fashion accessories … You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper … Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That’s because I’m a speechwriter, and I know how to make a point … It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with ‘lowers’ and ‘raises’ there? It’s called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and now you end with the one that’s not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free trade stops wars. And we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace. I’m sure I’ve seen that on a sign somewhere.
Less than seven months later, 9/11 happened, kicking off our current age of forever wars. Now, more than 25 years after the Battle in Seattle, we see lines on graphs continue to go up while most people’s lived economic experiences are incontestably worse. Police are more vicious than ever against protesters, regularly employing tactics like kettling which were considered shocking when they appeared in Seattle in 1999.
It's within this context that filmmaker Ian Bell looks back at these events in the documentary WTO/99. Bell, a Seattle native, has built a career out of archival-based projects like the VICE series Source Material and the special 187 Minutes, about the January 6 Insurrection. In the film, he conveys the events of the week of WTO protests through an easy-to-follow, linear timeline, entirely eschewing any interviews or voiceover commentary in favor of solely using footage and audio captured at the time. The result is a vivid, immersive on-the-ground portrait of the Battle in Seattle, reviving a historical episode that many have chosen to forget.
Bell and WTO/99’s other producers have adopted a grassroots, independent strategy to release the documentary, partnering with various theaters to screen it around the country. Amidst this ongoing rollout, I spoke with Bell over Zoom about growing up in Seattle and knowing people who took part in the protests, along with the process of turning a thousand hours of footage into a coherent feature film. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.
You grew up in Seattle, but you weren’t in the US during the WTO protests. How did news of it get to you? Was anyone you knew involved?
I moved to Japan probably two months before the events took place, taking a break from college and working over there. I knew about the protests only because my friend Mark Swanson, who was participating, was writing me letters—mailed letters, back in the day. I didn't have a television, and my Japanese wasn't good enough to read the newspaper, so I was learning about it well after it happened. At first, everything I knew was from Mark, who also took photos. I was gone for two years, but it really stuck with me, how the world came to my hometown. It was always in the back of my head that I wanted to learn more about it, if I could ever find an archive to dig into.
I came home a few months after 9/11, so the protests were no longer at the front of anyone’s mind. But whenever it did come up, I learned that a number of my cousins and high school friends participated, and they had life-changing stories. For those who weren’t on the ground, I think their exposure to the news coverage left them with the prevailing narrative, which was that the police did what they did because of the violence of the protestors. But the stories I heard from people who were there were very different.
In 2016, one of Trump’s big talking points was lambasting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is very much a consequence of the globalization standards set by the WTO. But you don’t often see the Battle in Seattle come up, even in the left-leaning spaces I frequent.
It always seemed to me that there was a part of our political history that wasn't being discussed, or which hadn't been digested. I knew from what I'd read and from my friends and family who participated that there was this event where all sorts of communities and interest groups from across the political spectrum came together. I was curious about the arc from that to the 2016 election. So many people were surprised that the labor vote went in a different direction.
What was the specific impetus for finally delving into an archive and making this film?
Alex [Megaro, producer] and I talked about it years earlier, but it wasn't until I moved back to Seattle. We’d already been working on Source Material for a while. I was interested in doing something about the protests for the series, but I was also just interested in meeting people. We talked about it while we were still at VICE, but we didn't start in earnest until our contract ran out, and VICE was in the middle of its transition to bankruptcy. It took us about two years to make the film. We didn't have the 25th anniversary of the protests in mind, and we didn't want to rush it for that benchmark, so we missed it by a few months.
I started reaching out to archivists around town to see what people were doing. I happened upon the nonprofit MIPoPS, the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound. They had been helping someone from Indymedia—which was born out of the protests—to organize and digitize roughly 400 hours of tapes from that week for preservation in the University of Washington’s Special Collections library. Eventually, I was given a hard drive full of the footage, and we started diving in.
What does this footage consist of? What had people given Indymedia?
A lot of it is what news field producers and cinematographers were capturing on the ground that week and compiling for their stories. Additionally, someone taped the local news nonstop, all three of our main stations. That was incredibly helpful because local news stations don’t keep their tapes, they don't preserve their live coverage. They keep the packages [pre-produced news stories], and those are searchable if they make their archives available. But I don't think we have anything from any packages in the film. I could be wrong, but I believe it’s all raw footage. It’s the same reason we didn’t interview folks; we wanted it all to come from the moment. Anyway, this person who taped the news, that material helped us build our timeline of the events, along with timestamps on some of the police tapes and whatnot.
From a media criticism angle, some of this stuff is very revealing. You have behind-the-scenes footage from a CNN interview with a lobbyist who’s there to deride the protestors, and we get to see them doing a dry run with him before they go live.
Yeah, that was in CNN’s materials. Once we found our first 400 hours, we found another 600 by reaching out to national and international media. Every month or so, I would try to meet a friend, or a friend of a friend, over coffee or lunch and hear their stories about that week. I wanted to see a little bit outside the frame every once in a while, and if they could remember anything that would spark a better understanding of what we were seeing in the footage. One thing that always stood out to me was how a few people were still haunted by the sound of the police slapping their nightsticks against their shin guards, that intimidation tactic. Details like that helped shape our emotional understanding of the events. It’s already otherworldly to see a municipal police department be in formation like that. And those conversations also sometimes resulted in someone saying, "Oh, I also have a tape you should see."
The film has a very straightforward, linear presentation of the events. Did you always intend that structure, or did you arrive at it later? And was it always intended to be all-archival, or had you considered a different approach?
We always knew it'd be all archival. Years ago, I found that I like to let the observations being made on the ground speak for themselves. If you can find enough angles, enough footage, each observation is a data point with which you can create something robust enough that it doesn't need any further intervention. Once we got the WTO protest footage, we had a conversation about what the approach might be, but it was clear that the most effective and simplest way was to step back and reconstruct the thing.
How did you go about that reconstruction? How much of it came from outside sources versus your primary materials?
We read as much as we could to give us a sense of what happened. The University of Washington has a timeline that was handy. But while those were helpful references, we built our own timeline solely from our footage. With the real-time tape of the news stations, obviously we always knew what time that footage was from. And a lot of footage on the ground could give us an accurate time of day, whether a clip had a time code burned in (though a few were in the wrong time zone) or the videographer showed the camera their watch. Downtown Seattle used to have a bunch of clocks, and sometimes they’d be caught on camera, and we could time the edit to those moments.
We built sequences in these time blocks—one would be the morning of November 30, another the afternoon. To pull footage for these blocks, we’d know, for instance, that a particular tape starts at 1:04 p.m., so we could start from there. Some incidents we only had one tape for, while others would have many, and we could get three or 12 angles on the same moment. Each block would have a main sequence that we would add to. If we found a new tape and could place the time and the location, we would add that layer to that sequence, cutting it down from the most reliable versions we could find.
Is there a particular book or article that you would recommend to anyone who wanted to learn more about these events?
The last thing we read was a book by the author-reporter DW Gibson, One Week to Change the World, an oral history of the protests. He interviews all these people and then organizes their recollections thematically. Approaching it as a documentarian, it's really nice, the way he lays it all out and doesn’t get in the way of the responses.
You, Alex, and Laura [Tatham, producer] wrote a piece for Filmmaker earlier this year about the unmistakable parallels between the Battle in Seattle and what we see in police responses to protests today. So much of what was alarming back then, like the police using kettling tactics or pepper balls on people, is now commonplace.
One of the things that drew us to the project was the sense that our contemporary [state of things] comes from somewhere. The changes we've seen, this authoritarian trend, may feel abrupt to so many people, but knowing enough about our political and economic history, we knew what to look for, and found a lot of it in the footage.
I'm sure everyone feels their hometown's a special place, but growing up in Seattle in the ’90s, it really was special. We had all this great art coming, and it felt like politically, people could make a change. It really stuck out to me that a completely Democratic hierarchy, from the mayor to the president, was demanding that the streets be cleared this way. It made the problems that we've been facing with police violence feel more universal. In the film, [labor organizer] Mike Dolan, on the third day, in a press conference the protest and labor organizations are holding, he talks about the no-protest zone, how he's never seen it before and hopes to never see it again. But we’ve seen that again and again ever since. There was a “free speech zone” at the last DNC.
