Ian Bell was not in Seattle for the WTO protests in 1999. But he assembled his film out of hundreds of hours of archival footage.
In the opening moments of Ian Bell’s astounding, purely archival documentary WTO/99, we meet young people on their way to Seattle to peacefully protest the upcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference. The ensuing days will be anything but peaceful. Instead, as we witness in countless amateur videos and news broadcasts stitched delicately together by Bell, they will be defined by now-infamous clashes between protesters and police.
Bell discovered that the violence in 1999 began not with protesters themselves but
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