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Trade Wars: Ian Bell on WTO/99
WTO/99 The archival documentary WTO/99 functions both as historical document and prophecy of the future, chronicling the four days in 1999 when anti-globalization activists from multiple movements—labor unions, student groups, teamsters, anarchists, nonprofit organizations like Global Exchange and the Rainforest Action Network—took to downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. While the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department initially took a hands-off approach to supervising the peaceful protests, they quickly adopted a more aggressive tack after protestors successfully blocked WTO delegates from reaching the convention center on the first day of the conference. Tear gas, pepper spray and stun guns were routinely deployed against the masses in the following days. The demonstrations, and the state violence they inspired, ultimately overshadowed the conference entirely.
The pre-Y2K nostalgia baked into WTO/99 lies in constant tension with its vision of our authoritarian present. Through independent footage filmed by protestors alongside local and national news sources, the film illustrates how organized solidarity—exhibited by people who come from all walks of life and harbor views across the ideological spectrum—serve as a genuine threat to state power. The police brutality, free speech suppression and media distortion depicted in WTO/99 have become all-too common elements of American life post-George Floyd. Within the last year, the government has become especially emboldened to violently subdue anyone who dissents from American supremacist narratives. In many ways, WTO/99 folds the past into the present until history becomes nothing more than an ugly flat circle.
I spoke with director and co-editor Ian Bell about crafting the documentary, various challenges with editing hundreds of hours footage and how the film depicts the end of the 20th century. Following its premiere at True/False, WTO/99 plays next at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival this weekend.
Filmmaker: You worked with Vice for many years, right?
Bell: Maybe three or four. [Producer] Alex [Megaro] and I had made a short film about the missile scare in Hawaii that happened a few years back, and that was a product of a number of years of being really interested in all-archival work and trying to find the right piece to try it out for the first time. My wife’s from the Big Island; we knew a lot of people that experienced that event, so it felt really personal. We took a few months to explore the footage and finally crafted something we thought would communicate what it was like to be there. From there, I started to think about how we could expand that approach to approach the news in a pre-filtered way, before a reporter gets to it for you. Because of the ubiquity of cell phones and surveillance cameras, you can see things, and we don’t necessarily always need someone to filter it for us.
That was the impetus of the show we did for Vice for two seasons called Source Material. It was basically a short doc series about different news events, and they were really kind to us and let us stick around even after the show ran its course. We contributed to the Showtime series and to Vice News Tonight in the same all-archival format. Our work culminated in 187 Minutes: The January 6th Insurrection, an hour-long special on the January 6 riots. We did a reconstruction of the 187 minutes between the end of Trump’s speech and him telling people to go home. At one point, we had a real-time 187-minute-long piece, then boiled it down for a primetime hour slot.
Filmmaker: Did compiling the Jan. 6 special together dictate the development of WTO/99, at least in capturing the event chronologically?
Bell: I wouldn’t call it a rehearsal, but we learned a lot making that project. Because there’s so much footage from [Jan. 6], we at times had a dozen or more unique sources capturing the same moment. We got a sharp eye about how to capture that one hand that goes up or that one flag that gets waved. We’d have screens where we would see 12 angles at once. We had to boil it down, of course—I think the most we showed in that piece was five or six at one time. But it got us thinking a lot about how you can create really cohesive scenes through multiple sources. When we’re working on WTO, we had that opportunity multiple times. There’s a lot of these intersections when the police were gassing the public, and we were able to sync eight [angles]; at one point, I think we had 11 on one moment, all capturing the same stuff. Often when you get archival footage, you know that there’s all this stuff happening out of frame, but you only have that one framing. In these cases, you can see every angle of the event; you know that this is happening because we’re not just seeing it from one angle.
Filmmaker: Was one of the formal goals for WTO/99 to edit the footage in such a way that it would situate the audience geographically from moment to moment?
Bell: We had a cut that was very geographically oriented. Like, you knew the street names. I think there were 13 intersections that led into the convention center that the protesters had planned on blocking. I’m a Seattleite. I was gone for a number of years, but I live here again and actually drive these streets taking my kid to school every morning. I go through them in procession, especially those main three where the gassing first started, so the geography was really important. But the more detailed we got, the more the story got lost. So, we kept the geography, but we did not insist that people could memorize the street names.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t [in Seattle] that year [when the protests occurred]. I had just finished my first year of college and was living abroad, and a good friend was writing me letters and sending photos he had been taking from the streets, so it always stuck in my mind. This major world event came through my hometown that I think really changed it—the Seattle of today is not the Seattle of the ’90s—so I’ve always wanted to know what it was like to be there. As I was starting to explore archival work almost a decade ago, the WTO was in the back of my mind. I started talking to Alex, my editing partner, about it a while back: just as an exercise, like with January 6, can we understand what actually happened through the footage? With WTO, there’s a lot of divergent opinions and people have their own experience, but would there be a way to look at enough footage to understand it for yourself? After we moved back from New York, I started reaching out to local filmmakers and archivists. Through a number of conversations, I learned about a few hundred hours of footage from the WTO protests that were in the middle of being digitized, and that was really the beginning of the work.
Filmmaker: Who was digitizing it?
Bell: An organization called MIPOPS here, working with the University of Washington’s special collections, along with a representative from the organization—[at] the time, it was called The Independent Media Center—that had organized a lot of this independent footage. So, someone from the Independent Media Center was getting all the producers to provide their tapes and hand them over to the UW and MIPOPS to organize and put in the libraries. We got hard drives the minute they were finished digitizing.
Filmmaker: Since you use a lot of local and national news sources, were you limited to certain sources of acquisition, depending on what you wanted to capture from a bird’s eye news perspective?
Bell: With the local news, we felt pretty lucky that KIRO [Seattle’s CBS affiliate] allowed us to license what we did. They were on the streets. I mean, their coverage was probably, measurably, just like any other local collection of stations; their footage is probably different than Channel Five or the other local affiliate. But KIRO had great footage, they were good to work with, their footage had been taped off the television by an independent producer and we were able to get those tapes. The local news stations don’t always keep all their live footage, so I was really fortunate that someone did that for them. There’s always gonna be stuff you can’t get ahold of. There was a local morning talk show guy named Pat Cashman, and I was trying to get his tapes because I thought it would [provide] really interesting texture, because he was a local comedian that had a really popular show, but we weren’t able to find that stuff. There was some local stuff I was really interested in that we couldn’t come across, but we did end up finding, another five hundred [hours] roughly. We’re in the ballpark of 1000 hours.
Filmmaker: I know that other documentary filmmakers who work in the archival space have recently come into some trouble with fair use, specifically production companies unwilling to take on legal challenges that arise from incorporating diverse footage. What was your experience navigating those waters with WTO?
Bell: I had a lot of experience with it at Vice. We had really excellent First Amendment lawyers that were always open to the conversation. I couldn’t justify it all the time, and if they weren’t willing to go to bat for it, we didn’t do it, which was totally fine. It was a really great process. On WTO, we tried to be as conservative as possible, license where we can, and we had legal counsel the whole time just giving us advice to make sure everyone was doing it the right way and sticking to the letter of the law. There were a few things we took out because we weren’t able to either make the argument or find the source or whatnot. There are moments where you find this great clip that almost becomes a oner in your piece. This happened at Vice a few times, and it just goes over that limit: “If you wanted five seconds of this, that’s totally justifiable, but you just want to let it roll for 40 seconds?” I don’t know what the cutoffs are, but you know what I’m saying.
Filmmaker: When did a structure start to take place in the editing room?
Bell: There’s a day before the event started that was kind of like prep, like practice marches. There was a rally to end global debt that encircled the Kingdome, which used to be our baseball stadium here. There was a time when that was included. At some point, we had a six-hour cut. There was a brief discussion about turning it into a three-part project. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that suggested it, and no one else supported it. But once you take a step back, not all of this is crucial. It’s just interesting that if we wanted to, we could probably have made a 50-hour real-time piece.
Once we had our cut, it became clear that there was something that happened on the first [day], November 30. It felt like people were gathering in a version of America where you could occupy the streets, protest, even be an inconvenience to a city and partially block delegates from getting into an event. Then the police responded the way they did and the city cracked down as hard as they did. And the next day, in some ways the city’s so quiet, so controlled, and people were arrested so quickly. It started feeling to us that was the first day of the 21st century. The 20th century ended and died on November 30, and new limits on speech and a new modality for the police began on that first day of December. Building the film around those two days as that contrast in American society became the clear way of building it out, then letting the event run its course and seeing the outcomes.
Filmmaker: While I knew about the WTO protests, it was chilling to witness state power swiftly and unceremoniously adopt a violent, confrontational approach to mass dissent. It’s a prophetic vision of what would become our contemporary, hyper-militarized reality. I’m not trying to pin you down, but I’m curious what, if any, was your political agenda with depicting the protests beyond simply capturing the historical event?
Bell: [chuckles] You’re not trying to pin me down, but what is my political agenda? I think, in broad strokes, we should pay attention to our history.
Filmmaker: Okay.
Bell: There’s rarely anything new. Things that are unfolding now—whatever the day is that “the now” you’re thinking about i—took a long time to get here. So, what was or was not happening in that development period that allowed us to get to today? If you watch it and go, “I can’t believe that Trump was considering running for president 25 years ago. I can’t believe Roger Stone looked mildly sane on C-SPAN. I can’t believe the Clinton era was under which this happened, and the labor movement and environmental movement felt disenfranchised from the Democratic Party”—I hope that people can watch it and see like, “Well, what is happening now, and how will it manifest in a quarter century? What role do I play as a member of the society?” I hope people examine their affiliations or sympathies. The week in our history that this film depicts clearly shows that, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, it’s not impossible to find common cause. I don’t want to be too prescriptive for anyone, because I think that there’s a power in this approach. If people are allowed to sit with the footage like we did, then they can pull he things that matter to them. That way of learning and personal discovery is really, really powerful.
Filmmaker: It was a mild surprise when Alan Keyes pops up near the end of the film during a GOP presidential primary debate. It’s not just the “Remember Alan Keyes?” aspect, but also the fact that he sounded halfway sane.
Bell: When we were getting feedback from friends and colleagues, one of my oldest friends was like, “It’s uncomfortable that I find myself agreeing with people I’m not supposed to agree with.” I think that’s really revealing about the way we approach our politics.
Filmmaker: I think the danger with archival films is the trap of falling into an “objective” approach: “We’re just showing it you. We don’t have a point of view.” But as broad a tack WTO takes, it clearly shows what happens when ideologically disparate people stand in solidarity against the state and how far that gets them when the state decides what it’s willing to permit. What comes through is like a “Power to the People”-type approach.
Bell: I think there’s other themes too, and maybe I can be more clear on this. There are consequences to not listening to the people. There’s a reason why so many people gathered, whether it’s the environmental consequences that we’re all becoming very clear on, [the danger] of not changing course with the way we approach conservation and preservation, or climate stability, or even the questions that people were presenting about the integration of China and how it would affect the economic power dynamics, or also how it may or may not improve conditions for certain people in China. Those themes are not in the forefront, I don’t know if everyone walks away with them, but they’re there.
Filmmaker: I’m curious if there was any guiding directive that arose during editing about what to exclude from the film, whether for narrative purposes or because certain political ideas didn’t fit within the film.
Bell: I don’t think anything was excluded because it ran counter to the narrative. There were humdrum moments of a police officer grabbing lunch, or something not happening on the streets, that got excluded. There were even great moments where we had an interview with a fully gas-masked riot-suited police officer who’s talking very calmly and casually: “Oh yeah, the protesters haven’t been violent at all”—but he’s saying it through his mask. Then he says, “I don’t know if we’re gonna gas anybody, but if my sergeant tells me to, I have to.” That was such a great beat, but it ruined the rhythm of every moment we tried to put it in. We had also set off with intentions of making the deliberation around China a stronger theme, and even had archival producers who are familiar with Chinese archives trying to help us find that throughline, and it was never strong enough. If the footage can’t tell us that, we don’t use it.
Filmmaker: There’s a strong section in the middle of the film where you capture how the WTO protests became a focal point for a variety of issues related to anti-globalization: human rights abuses at home and abroad, the decline of U.S. manufacturing as a necessary byproduct of outsourced labor, general anxiety around the dismantling of environmental protections, the fear of multinational corporations exerting unregulated political power, etc. A common critique of the protests was that there wasn’t a singular issue to stand behind. How conscious were you of depicting the broad ideological spectrum inherent in the movement without necessarily saying that it was a problem?
Bell: A lot of local people believed what the local news told them: “It was outside ruffians causing a problem.” But if they understood it, or had some sort of sense of it all, the message was muddled. After watching all the footage, we had a sense for what the messages were, or at least the major nodes from each other group, and wanted to try to bring some clarity to them. Because they were there; I just don’t think they got time in the local media in the way they could or should have. This might not incorporate all of the sentiments that were being brought to the streets, but one thing that’s generally shared was sovereignty, whether it’s labor, human rights, environmental rights. At the core of it was, “We can pass a law in our city that can be deemed a trade barrier by an international organization where there’s no reciprocity.” I don’t think they had messaging meetings between the groups, but having watched hundreds of hours of footage, that is the unifying issue.
Filmmaker: You do a good job of capturing the ways corporate media narratives inevitably emerge in these situations. At one point, you feature someone being interviewed on the local news complaining about how they show the same ten seconds of footage of people ransacking a Starbucks. It made me think of how much air was wasted on the occasional looter during the George Floyd protests. When did you want to emphasize media’s impact on the protests?
Bell: We had this two-pronged approach [with footage] where at first it has to be a successful artifact, and then if a theme emerges, the artifact has to emerge within that chronology, so the themes are subservient to the artifact. It just so happened that the coverage that we found and had access to didn’t seem to have a sense for what was happening in the early morning, Day Two became our time to show the contrast between what was happening on the ground and what the media was covering.
Filmmaker: How long did editing take?
Bell: Just under two years. 16 months, maybe? We worked on it for about two years. Alex started a few months before me organizing the footage and started to put together some scenes. I finished my last project at Vice, then jumped on full time from November 2023.
Filmmaker: Was it finished end of 2024?
Bell: Funnily enough, we had a meeting like 10 hours before we got invited to True/False, and the team meeting was like, “It looks like we might get passed up for a few more festivals, so we got four more months,” or whatever we decided. Then we got the email later that day and we were like, “Oh, we actually have six weeks to finish this.”
Filmmaker: You did mention before the world premiere at True/False that you hadn’t seen it in full.
Bell: Alex, being the amazing partner he is, [flew out to Seattle] and lived at my house for almost three weeks, and we pretty much got the edit where we wanted to at that point. But when it premiered, I had not seen it from tip to tail with all the graphics, all the subs, and a mix in place. Of course, I’d seen the locked cut, but it was my first time actually watching it.
Filmmaker: What were the editing challenges from a macro thematic standpoint and a micro scene-by-scene one?
Bell: I probably spent a month just on one of those intersections, watching everything and making sure I had the rhythm down. To get that kind of accuracy can be pretty grueling. We like to think on Day One, we basically know within five minutes where all the footage is, especially in the daytime, and after that, we know that it’s in order and within the time cards that we’re showing. But the challenge once you get to a really rough assembly is to go from six-and-a-half hours to 100 minutes. You have to just start lobbing whole chunks away. Alex and I have worked together in this style for so long that we trust each other to go, “Okay, I’m going to do a Scissorhands cut. I’m going to take the six hours and give you back a four-hour [version], and tell me what you think we’re missing. If you remember something, then we’ll discuss bringing it back.”
Filmmaker: Was the VHS framework there from the beginning? The fact that the whole film looks like it came from the tape?
Bell: The “Stop video” was there pretty early and the “Play” was a later decision. But I really like including the textures of the archives that you’re working with. At Vice, we would get footage out of pretty rough situations where the cell phones got damaged, or they got hit by something, and you get these really digital green spots and stuff, and I think that adds an authenticity. It also just shows the what the cameras going through to get this, and what the operator is going through. There was probably a lot more texture at some point, then we dialed it back until it felt like the right balance.
Filmmaker: How did the ending develop?
Bell: As we were making it, we read a lot about what happened next. Where did the momentum go? Why was there a big period without economic protests? Occupy Wall Street re-emerged a decade or so later, but there was a lot of energy, and people cite 9/11 as a time when it all went away. We felt like that was what happened, so that’s what we show, just like with the rest of the film. We had a different ending where we talked about a lawsuit that happened afterwards, and how the SPD lost that. It felt so focused on the on this individual department’s brutality and the missteps they took, and it wasn’t really about this people’s energy and where did it go? So, we ended up with what we have. It feels like a really strong choice, but just like the bulk of the film, we approached it as, “That’s what happened.”
Then the coda-coda that’s happening around the credit roll: throughout the whole process, we talked about how this event is really important as a standalone historical event, but it lives within the context of the 25 years we’ve lived since. As we mulled some ideas about how to provide just enough context to give people a sense of how it might have played out, and knowing that the WTO had lost judges, or hadn’t gotten judges back, mainly because of the U.S. blocking new judges in the appellate court—we didn’t want to do another whole graduate-level explainer on how the appellate court works, but we wanted people to get a sense that this thing that we were really worried about actually doesn’t work anymore. What are the consequences when the WTO doesn’t exist? Trade war, which is what we’re experiencing now. It was our way of giving a bit of a primer and something you could talk about as you walk home.
The people that took to the streets were demanding the end of the WTO. Those people came from really different places on the political spectrum, but I would imagine that—and I don’t want to answer this for anyone, but just some from assumptions—not all of them had in mind what has come to be. I would be really surprised, and I’m really interested in those conversations about what the result was. We also didn’t want people to leave being, “Let’s get rid of the WTO!” That’s a whole different thing that’s already happened. But [we wanted] to talk about the power of the people to make change, our role in a global economy, and what does it look like to trade, and trade fairly.
