WTO/99

An immersive, fully archival documentary, WTO/99 depicts the four-day clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the tens of thousands who travelled from around the world to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the organization's ministerial conference — the first, and to date last, to take place in the U.S. — and sound the alarm on the WTO's secretive dealings, impacts on human rights, labor, and the future effects of continued globalization.

The WTO, whose member nations control 90% of global trade, was ushered in by both Republican and Democratic administrations at the same time as the U.S. was experiencing the continued loss of hundreds of thousands of union and manufacturing jobs. From November 30 to December 3, 1999,  downtown Seattle was occupied by those voicing their concerns about the closed-door negotiations at the WTO conference in the largest protests against economic globalization the United States has ever seen. Bringing together divergent sections of society — environmentalists, labor unions, consumer protection advocates, pro-democracy groups, and even religious organizations — this cross-class coalition of protestors gathered in direct action, hoping to dissuade world leadership from continued support of the WTO and strove to focus the public's attention to the kind of future the WTO would bring forth, and in which we currently live. But the protesters — seen as a rabble-rousing nuisance at the time, yet appearing prophetic today — were met with extreme violence by a militarized police force tasked with public service, but that in practice were meeting the demands of private interests.

Building from a roughly 1,000 hour archive, WTO/99 uses footage shot by citizen journalists, the news media, and even police to convey the diverse positions of stakeholders on all sides of the debate, reanimating the ideological conflicts that drew thousands to the streets of Seattle in hopes for a more equitable global economy. The film is an engrossing visual artifact of a week that brought the world together to warn of environmental collapse, the vanishing middle class, and what the shift in decision making from publicly elected officials to the private, corporate delegates of the WTO would mean for our collective future. Met with violence from the police, ire from establishment political figures, and obfuscation from the mainstream media, the events of that week marked the dawn of a new century that would become defined by the continued failure to address climate change, increasing state aggression, and protections for the working class. WTO/99 looks to one formative event in recent history to help understand how we got to where we are today.