WTO/99 opens not with chaos but with assurances. Protesters against the World Trade Organization (WTO) — the body countries turned to when they wanted to challenge another nation’s labor or environmental protections as “barriers to trade” and the institutional muscle behind the era of plant closures, offshoring, and supply chains that could leap borders, leaving workers behind and pollution, deforestation, and deregulation in their wake — travel to Seattle in late November 1999, discussing their plans for the week ahead and their hope that, despite the scale of what’s coming, the police will not overreact. Seattle police officials, interviewed on local news channels, echo that confidence. They say they are prepared and stress their support for people’s right to express their views for the first time the WTO has met on US soil.
The calm will not last. And the film makes clear from the beginning that what follows is not simply a story of a city losing control of its streets. It’s a story about the enforcement mechanisms that backstop the “inevitable” order of capitalist globalization that protesters are in Seattle to oppose — and how quickly those mechanisms appear once that order is disrupted.
What distinguishes WTO/99 from the long tail of “Battle in Seattle” retrospectives is its refusal to turn Seattle 1999 into a founding myth or a morality play. The film isn’t especially interested in deciding whether the protests “worked.” Instead, it reconstructs what happened — in rooms populated by activists, political leaders, and police, and on Seattle’s streets, allowing meaning to emerge as events unfold.
The documentary is composed entirely of archival footage, letting those images do the editorializing. This was a pre-smartphone era, before the constant circulation of protest footage made images of police escalation familiar. Today, on city streets patrolled by…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
