WTO/99

The best unreleased film of 2025 is Ian Bell and Alex Megaro's masterfully edited archival documentary about the 1999 World Trade Organization Conference protests. These were the massive anti-globalization street demonstrations held outside the hotels and Convention Center in Seattle, where international trade negotiations were to be discussed and decided, which most mainstream media outlets dismissed as a bunch of whining hippies disrupting all-important financial discussions that they knew nothing about. The fact that the conservative estimate of 40,000 protesters made this larger than any previous demonstration in the US against any world meeting of any organization associated with economic globalization, and the fact that those protesting were a diverse cross-section of Americans ranging from students, farmers, anarchists, religious groups, environmentalists, consumer protection advocates, NGOs, labor unions, and conservative, libraral, and libertarian politicians and activists, was significanty downplayed by most press outlets. Those who write the first draft of history, and those who try to turn one-sided spin into historical fact, would like us to believe these protesters were all ignorant left-wing kids who just didn't understand how the economy works. Though it was a significant story of the final monthers of the film year of the 20th Century, many will perhaps only know of the "Battle of Seattle" from the writings of people like the Leni Riefenstahl of neoliberalism, Aaron Sorkin, whose Season Two episode of the West Wing, "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail," is one of the most egregious examples of staunch, myopic conservativsum dressed as intellectual progressivism that show ever did (and that's really saying something!)

Fortunately, WTO/99 is not one of those terrible, simplistic, spoon-feeding documentaries that explain a narrow thesis to its audience using clips from popular entertainment or talking heads. Rather, director/co-producer/co-editor Bell and co-producer/co-editor Megaro painstakingly construct this 102-minute film from hundreds of thousands of hours of video footage shot by protesters and the news media over the five days of the event. They use no narration, no experts looking back with hindsight and reconstructing things from a contemporary point of view; they just show what happened and how it was reported, using contemporaneous video footage that tells the story and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

Not since Jason Osder's incredible 2012 documentary Let the Fire Burn, which uses only television news and local cable access footage to chronicle the deadly 1985 confrontation between the Black liberation group MOVE and the Philadelphia police department and the political administration of the city, has a historical event been so exquisitely conveyed and contextualized using nothing but video footage from the moment. I have no idea how long Bell and Megaro spent logging, sifting, and cutting this footage together, or how large their editing staff was, but they are able to discover all kinds of incredible details and weave them in. One aspect that might seem commonplace in the smartphone era but was far less expected in the days of tape-based camcorders is the ability to cut together multiple angles of the same specific action, which occasionally occurs here to great effect. The film is a powerfully immersive work of non-fiction, giving the viewer the feeling not so much of being there as of paying the kind of attention we probably should have paid at the time this occurred, given that the vast majority of what the protestors were warning about has indeed come to pass.