WTO/99 (2025)

A document about a turning point in American politics and protest culture. If you want to understand how we got here, start in Seattle in 1999.

I had a chance to see a screening of this in Minneapolis, put on by Smitten Kitten at the Main theater in St. Anthony, with a Q&A with the editor. Absolutely wonderful experience.

The editing and archival work are incredible. WTO/99 wisely tells the story of the World Trade Organization’s first meeting in Seattle through archival footage and news segments, arranged in chronological order over the four days of protest. No talking heads, no retrospective framing - just what was captured at the time, letting you see how it unfolded in real time.

What’s most telling is how this documents a turning point. Seattle 1999 was the first time militaristic police tactics were deployed on American civilians at this scale - pepper balls, tear gas against peaceful protesters, the National Guard called in. It was the first use of “protest free zones,” a concept that sounded dystopian at the time and is now standard practice. The playbook written in Seattle has been used against every major protest movement since - Occupy, Standing Rock, Ferguson, and beyond.

The film also shows how the media undermined the protesters in real time. Watch how the coverage shifts from the actual message - critiques of globalization, labor rights, environmental destruction - to obsessive focus on broken windows and “anarchist violence.” Watch how they humiliate protesters, dismiss their concerns, frame property damage as equivalent to state violence. These tactics haven’t changed. The mainstream media still does this. Every single time.

Coming from the Twin Cities, this felt deeply personal. We have plenty of experience with protesting, fighting the police, and the media misportraying our movements. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I watched the same playbook deploy in my city. The same militarized response. The same media framing - “riots” instead of rebellion, property damage instead of police brutality, outside agitators instead of community grief. The 3rd Precinct burned, and suddenly the conversation was about a building instead of a man murdered in the street. And then in the winter of 2026, the federal occupation by ICE - again, the same tactics, the same media spin, the same attempt to delegitimize resistance.

Seattle in 1999 was the blueprint. The militarization of police. The media playbook for discrediting dissent. The normalization of treating protesters as enemies of the state. We are still living in the aftermath of those four days. This documentary makes that lineage undeniable.

If you’ve ever wondered why protests feel so surveilled, so militarized, so immediately delegitimized by media coverage - this is where it started. This is why you should care.

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