Bedatri Choudhury (Senior Features Programmer at DOC NYC) leads a Q&A with director Ian Bell, producer Alex Megaro, producer Laura Tatham, a
WTO/99 Q&A with Ian Bell, Alex Megaro, Laura Tatham, Debra McClutchy, and Barbaros Ali
11/14/2025
transcript:
BEDATRI CHOUDHURY: Hello, hello. Thank you for staying past your bedtimes…
[audience laughs]
BEDATRI: …for this Q&A. Thank you so much for sticking around. My name is Bedatri, I’m a Senior Features Programmer here at the festival. And can I please welcome back on stage, Ian Bell, director, editor, producer. Alex Megaro, editor and producer. Laura Tatham, producer. And Debra McClutchy, archival producer.
[audience cheering and clapping]
IAN BELL: And Baros, our sound mixer, is with us as well. We got a few other crew members in the crowd. We might call you out and ask you a question too, so, yeah. [indistinct]
BEDATRI: Ian, I’m thinking of source material, and I’m like… what about found footage and archival excites you? Yeah.
IAN: Yeah, first of all, Vivek Kemp is in the house. He made source material possible. We– Alex and I got to– Thank you, Vivek.
[audience clapping]
IAN: Alex and I got to work for two plus years on an all archival series on Vice News. It was like they gave us a playground and didn’t ask too many questions, and it was a pretty nice– So we got better there. I think with… with found footage and archival there’s this ability to get to the moment and not rely on memories or on pe– you know, interviews where people can, I don’t know, people are– wanna look good in their own memories. They wanna… whatever.
[audience laughs]
IAN: Just, memory’s flawed. And we finished this whole century in front of a lens, and we have this like, this really beautiful gift where we can go back, ‘cause so many people captured moments and preserved it for us to learn from directly. And… so yeah. I’m really drawn to experiencing it first hand. The WTO event happened in my home town. I wasn’t there, and it’s always stayed in the back of my mind. And when we found the first 400 hours, which ended up becoming 1000 hours, it felt like the moment where like– because I’d heard so many opinions about it from family and friends that were there, and whatever. From all sorts of parts of the political spectrum. And I feel like I never really understood it until I made it. And it’s like just a really great way to learn how things unfold.
BEDATRI: This brings me to my next question: Why WTO/99? Like there’s so many other [laughing] things that’s happened in this country, why this film– why this incident at that point of history?
IAN: So we started talking about it, I don’t know, eight years ago or so. Some of the discourse during 2016 seemed to have longer echoes. And concerns about trade and deindustrialization, and then rising police militarization, and being from Seattle, having some stories at the back of my mind. I had this like, this like… in– I don’t know, there’s like an itch. I thought maybe some of this stuff ran through that event. And– because I think we think of NAFTA really quickly when it comes to deindustrialization, and like the shift of the united class, the labor class away from the Democratic party. But these things are also happening then, and I didn’t really fully understand the role of the WTO in global trade either at the time when we first started. And as we started making it, it became really apparent that like these themes that we thought were in there were really in there. And… and also like maybe we didn’t– the national conversation hadn’t fully examined why the, you know, we had so much political upheaval over the last ten years. And it was just really, I don’t know if this is the question, but just well a little fun– fun? Not fun.
[audience laughs]
IAN: Just a thing that I thought was really interesting was like here you had the full democratic hierarchy that was like shutting down the people. And you had the labor class be very clear about what they needed out of them. And the environmental movement. And people from all walks of life being like, “This shit’s not cool,” And that [indistinct] not listening?
And so like the warnings of that shift were then and we’ve seen them kind of [indistinct]. So that’s [indistinct]
BEDATRI: And it’s interesting because this morning we screened the Amy Goodman film, and to see her back on the screen here, I was like, “Oh, she’s everywhere!” [laughs]
[audience laughs]
BEDATRI: But also there’s this part where Bill Clinton calls and like heckles her on air, live. So lots of echoes there. But as editors and producers, and like one thing about… like, you know, when you ask a person about their lives, their memories, it’s like finite, right? They talk about the last 50 years they’ve been alive. But with something like this, this is obviously not all the footage that ever existed on this, so as editors, you also edited the film, but also as producers it sounds like a nightmare.
[audience laughs]
IAN: [laughs]
BEDATRI: Because you don’t know where to stop.
LAURA TATHAM: It’s not not a nightmare.
ALEX MEGARO: It’s not not a nightmare. It’s a lot of footage [laughs]. Don’t know where to stop… it’s interesting, it was… The challenge was how to structure it because when you’re presented with, you know, the largest box of Legos imaginable just dumped in front of you, you have, kind of, infinite permutations of what you can do. Ian and I talked about the structure of this for so long. At one point we were thinking like jumping in time and trying to comment, and that was a terrible idea. And once we figured out this rigid chronology that the film takes we sort of formed this larger idea of this piece as a historical artifact, and a historical artifact first. And all editing is in service of the artifact. And it was our attempt to make a film like as objectively, or as objective as one can do while still editing a feature, and yeah, just make it as truthful as possible, as we possibly could given what we had in front of us. So all editing is in service of this artifact we never take footage from three hours later, put it three hours early ‘cause the footage would match and something would be more dramatic and the drama would be heightened, so that kind of informed so many of our choices where it was really– it was in service to the chronology. And that truth was extremely important to us. But there was also, you know, a thousand hours of footage, so it was still a constant nightmare hellscape that we were going in.
But yeah, it was about telling that truth and making sure that it flowed in a very specific way. It’s about transitions, it’s not a staccato, here’s a fact, here’s a fact, here’s a fact. We want you to be able to live in it. We wanted it to work as a factual document, so you’ll walk away understanding what happened, the reasons why– what– the opinions of every side, but on a second level, an experiential piece where you get emotional truth that you might not be able to get if this were told in a different way. So even if the– all the facts being thrown at you, it’s dense, it’s a lot, but that emotional truth and the experience of living through what it’s like to be in a protest will inform the factual and vice versa. And, you know, we wanted everyone to experience what it might be like to live through a police state, but fortunately for all of us, we’re all gonna get to do that in a few months, so…
[audience laughs]
LAURA: Yeah…
BEDATRI: [indistinct]
LAURA: Yeah, I will say definitely, you know, you were talking about like, “Oh, when do you know how to stop?” And it’s like, I don’t know, a thousand hours feels pretty good.
[audience laughs]
LAURA: And I think, you know, part of the reason this film got made is because Ian was working with the University of Washington, and he found out that they were, for the first time, digitizing 450 hours of footage from protestors on the street. And, you know, we were the first people that had access to it, maybe much to the University of Washington’s chagrin looking back.
[audience laughs]
LAURA: And then, you know, we had a lot of other sources coming in, right? Like you're seeing footage that Debra was able to get from the police, you’re seeing municipal footage. And I think the most amazing part of this really for me is that all of that like live on the street footage you see, all of the Channel 7 footage doesn’t technically exist in their archives. So there was like one guy basically, and he was recording on a VCR off the TV every day with the live broadcast. So when we reached out to Channel 7 we were like, “Hey, so like we’ve got a lot of footage.” You know, and it was all from this University of Washington archive, and we said, “We’d really like to use it in our film.”
And they were like, “You have that? We don’t have that footage.”
And we’re like, “Uh, okay cool. We have it. Can we pay you something for it and just like use it?”
And they were like, “Yeah okay, that seems fine.”
[audience laughs]
LAURA: So, you know, there’s a lot of really interesting, sort of, things that happened as we go along, and I feel like Deb, you probably have a lot more to say about the archival because you had sort of a heavy lift. Like we started with this 450 hours, and then we started– sort of built out from what we were able to see, and that’s really when you came in and just got all these things we needed.
DEBRA MCCLUTCHY: Yeah, it was definitely a collaborative effort. And Noah Broch is in the audience
[audience clapping]
DEBRA: …who was an early archival researcher on this that set us up really well also. But yeah, it was a collaborative process, we were all pulling in material. But I did come on board and pull in even more material with– I’ve worked with the Municipal Archive in Seattle with Libby… Hopfauf is her last name. Fun last name. She’s an amazing archivist. And part of the story really is a preservation story because these video tapes that were collected by an organization called Indie Media, it was volunteer videographers and citizen journalists that were out there documenting this, and were very intentional about like documenting it in a way that you wouldn’t see in mainstream media. So all hail the archivists and the preservation people out there.
[audience clapping]
DEBRA: Yeah. Because otherwise this story couldn't be told. There weren’t cellphones back then. People had their MiniDV cameras, their Hi8 cameras. If you have that footage right now, get it transferred immediately because there is a magnetic media crisis, and it will disintegrate if you don’t get it transferred, so I highly recommend that. But yeah, but then we pulled in stuff from international news archives, American archives, [indistinct], Seattle police department. So many places.
LAURA: Yeah.
DEBRA: And then like the University of Washington, these videographers, we had to get permission from them, so we had to reach out, and you know, really explain what we were doing, intentionality behind it, and get them on board, which was always a scary thing to do with some people. But they knew what we were doing and were very supportive, and yeah.
BEDATRI: But the sound like, you know, like Laura said, like sometimes it was like a copy of a copy, or like– it was coming in from so many different sources. How do you even like… What's the magic sauce you use…
[crew laughs]
BEDATRI: …to make it sound uniform and like, you know, great, as we just heard.
BARBAROS KAYNAK: That was a quite puzzle to work with.
LAURA: [laughs]
BARBAROS: But I think the one thing is very important that happened in this movie, generally it doesn’t happen, so in the credits you guys didn’t see any sound design or foley artists because there was none. So we were able to use only the source material. So there is only two places I just had to add a kind of ambience because there was none in the source material, which is like ten seconds, I would say. But rest of the hear– the things that you hear was all source material. There is no additional… sweeteners. So I guess that was the most important thing we were able to pull it from this project.
BEDATRI: Thank you. I’ll open it up to the audience, but let me give this audience question because I know it will come. Licensing fees. How–
LAURA: No! No, no, no…
BEDATRI: Listen, if I don’t ask it someone in the audience will.
LAURA: [laughs]
BEDATRI: So…
LAURA: I have yet to recover [indistinct]. Yeah no, we had to pay them. It was a really good chunk of our small budget. I will say we were really, really lucky in that, I would say, I don’t know, like 40, 45 minutes of the film is taken from the University of Washington. And bless the University of Washington, which is the only time I will say that on microphone because their licensing fees were super, super, super cheap, so that really made, sort of, that part of this accessible and affordable to us. Everyone else, however… You know, you see like some, you know, like CNN, right? You see like the, the CBC, very expensive. And [laughs] that’s where a really good majority of our budget went. We were also really lucky in that Ian like had relationships with some folks that were on the ground there, and they were able to lay some things just straight over to us. That made up a lot of it too, and you know, we really tried to give them a fair fee so they felt like they were getting something for their contribution, but also it wasn’t like, I don’t know, $120 a second or whatever people charge, some like really eye bleeding amount. But yeah, no, that was a very, very, very, very, very high portion of our budget. And were it not for the University of Washington, it would be way more.
IAN: One thing, can I– So, the only source we could find that was really articulate about what was happening on the streets was the CBC on day one. Every other news channel was like, “I dunno what’s happening!”
[audience laughs]
IAN: And, but the CBC, what I learned is like if you are like on– just observing the thing in front of you and telling it straight, you can charge thousands of dollars a second, so good job, CBC.
[audience laughs]
BEDATRI: This is my last question. I read your essay for Filmmaker Magazine where…
LAURA: [laughs]
BEDATRI: I do my homework! [laughs] And you talk about what just happened in LA, the National Guard in the streets, and you draw parallels between this film and what we’re living through, but… I don’t know how to frame this, but if the world this film was releasing into was a different world, do you think this film would’ve been a different film? In the way it’s perceived by the audience.
IAN: Yeah.
[audience laughs]
IAN: I mean, I think that like the, you know, LA aside, I think that like the, the economic message and like the… the message about representative democracy would’ve still resonated, but Alex says, and I’ll let him take it from here, he says the worse the world gets the better– like the better the film’s received?
[audience laughs]
ALEX: The worse the world gets, [laughs] the better the film’s received.
[audience laughs]
ALEX: That’s basically it. I basically had said, you know, if there’s a point– throughout the year it’s been received better and better. We premiered, we worked on this for, we were editing for two, two and a half years, it premiered the week that tariffs became a talking point again. So that was really bizarre to us. That we made the most relevant movie out of nowhere.
[audience laughs]
ALEX: And then yeah, as the year’s gone on we’re screening more, people are embracing this more. Recently [laughs] we won an award, and I said to Ian, “That’s not a good sign for the world.”
[audience laughing]
ALEX: Like oh shit. Yeah, so if we get more accolades, watch out and start buying some body armor, I guess.
LAURA: [indistinct] It was never our intention to be this relevant. [laughs] Like at all.
BEDATRI: Questions from the audience. Yes.
PERSON 1: I wonder how many people in this audience were at one of the WTO protests.
IAN: A few.
PERSON 1: Where’s the DC? [indistinct]
IAN: You were at the DC one for the–
PERSON 1: Yeah. I was in the noodle puppet (?). Anyway. Thank you guys so much. I love what you said about the archive and how and like making the film [indistinct] to that and a historical document. It’s so rare and beautiful, and all the work with the archive [indistinct]. I think it’s so, yeah so important, and rare as well. I mean, it was for me just shocking the– to see that imagination and creativity in those protests [indistinct] this is more of a comment, sorry. Look at how we’re doing– how we’re acting now, and we’re– we’re just little, little moles with our heads in the ground. It’s insanity that we’ve forgotten how to do these things. We were so good at that. I think it’s interesting [indistinct] so I’m just curious a bit about that. About how you felt editing this film, because you could’ve gone all these different directions. Yeah, I’m kind of curious about– and also your own personal lives as activists and media, and how do you, yeah where does [indistinct]
IAN: Uh…
[audience laughs]
IAN: I’ll just take the, “Why 9/11?” part of that question. The easiest part. We, well we didn’t know how to end it, to be honest. We finished the four days, and so– we finished the four days first, and then we thought, we gotta have an opening, we gotta have an ending. And the opening… Alex and I talked a lot about how like maybe– it’s almost like you have like a little like graduate seminar in like trade policy and the history of global economic pacts, and so it’s up to everyone in this room individually if we did that okay or not.
And so that was our attempt to sort of like set the stage and give you a little bit of– just enough to give you the stakes of why people protested. And then we just, you know, we obviously watched a lot, we didn’t just watch footage and listen to interviews from that, we kept listening, we kept– and we read a bunch of books. It kept coming up. People would say, “9/11 happened and we didn’t know what to do.” Or some people would say, “I didn’t feel… I didn’t know how to feel about the thing. It wasn’t appropriate to do the thing.” Other groups were very clear expressing like they felt more surveilled. There was more like the power coming down on them. And so there wasn’t– everyone's experiences that we were reading about were different, but there was like a unifying theme of like this thing happened and we should– we don’t know. And so, and there was all that energy, and we sort of just felt like it’s kind of a natural conclusion. We spoke with people who, you know, professors who study this thing [indistinct]. We just try to get an input to really get an understanding of where it went and maybe how it dissipated. So that’s where we landed. Just like the bulk of them, we just try to do them as it was.
PERSON 1: Were you guys able to get money for taking this to different places?
IAN: No. We recently just got turned down for a big grant.
LAURA: [laughs]
[audience laughs]
IAN: They were like, “Who needs this?”
[audience laughs]
IAN: “Unity?” [laughs] “Fighting the power?”
BEDATRI: Yes in the back.
PERSON 2: Could you talk a little bit about going through that thousand hours of footage? When you were approaching this project, were there turning points and things you were already looking for as high water marks in the protests? And then, what were moments that surprised you going through the footage that ended up becoming critical moments in the final product?
ALEX: So far as going through it, if you know the Charlie Day conspiracy board meme…
[audience laughs]
ALEX: …that was pretty much our brains. It’s still my brain, unfortunately. So that’s what that experience was. But I think we went in, as Ian mentioned, there were, you know, we saw these parallels that could be there, that we would hope to find, but the way we approached this is we have no voice over, we have no interviews, we have no crutch to lean on. So if it’s not in the footage we can’t really discuss it in the film.
Fortunately for us, these parallels were so much greater and more apparent than we could have hoped to make this what it was. And… I think we just kept finding these opportunities to comment in ways we never would have anticipated. Such as the– on day two, you see the news reporter walk around the street, and there’s someone who just happened to be following him as he’s going around being a dick to people, and you can see in real time how the media is reporting on something verses the reality on the ground, which is just something we never could have anticipated, but was just like a gift that fell to us. You can see the media lying outright, and saying like, “They have no idea why they’re here!” To a guy saying, “They’re not telling all of you why we’re here.”
So it– we can show the purposeful media disinformation campaign. That was one of the big things that we could’ve dreamed of showing, and we just found amazing matching footage. It’s a testament to how many people went out there with intentionality with the way they were shooting. Because you had to make the choice to bring a camcorder to an event like this. Which is not to look down on anyone who’s filming something now with their camera phone. It’s just a different style of going about it. They went with this intentionality, and they went with a mission, and because these archives were preserved for 20+ years, we can see the fruits of that mission.
And, you know, maybe it took some time to fall into our hands, but I just feel fortunate that we were able to tell these stories, draw these parallels, show the lies that were told about this event and how it was portrayed in the media. And also show that this shit’s been going on way longer than everyone is telling you. Like Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere, and the seeds were planted a long time ago. Everyone wants you to think this creeping fascism just showed up, but you see it here, and that was a very important thing for us. As Ian mentioned too, like this didn’t pop out of thin air, this was going on for a long time. It was happening before this. This just became an– we saw it in our eyes as a hinge point in American history and activist history, and a much more important hinge point than I think the larger media wants all of us to believe. Maybe that answered the question. I don’t know.
[audience clapping]
IAN: If it’s alright, before we do like a final applause, if you guys wanna applause,
[audience laughing]
IAN: can I get the other crew members down? Gavin and Noah and Steve. Just like come join us for a final hurrah.
[audience cheering and clapping]
IAN: Oh yeah, Maggie! Maggie. Are you in the room? Yeah! I’ve never met Maggie.
[audience laughs]
IAN: [indistinct]
[audience cheering and clapping]
LAURA: Oh my god, that’s such a great question! Thank you for asking. [laughs] So, you are producing my film. I love you. This will be– so if you wanna watch this again and just spend another almost two hours living in this… this will be at DCTV for one week. It’ll be three showings a day staring on December 5th. Our opening night moderator is going to be Amy Goodman, who we see in the film.
[audience cheering and clapping]
LAURA: So ya’ll should come out for that. And also we have like a lot of “No WTO” buttons. So please, everyone, if you want one, come up to me as you’re leaving. I will give you one.
IAN: And I’ll say one thing. This is super lame and not very Seattle of me, but like if you want to vote for us for the audience award that’d be kind of cool? We’re not like– people don’t like giving us awards sometimes, so…
[audience clapping]
BEDATRI: Thank you everyone. Good night. And the way you vote is… read the instructions on your tickets.
IAN: We’ll be here on Monday! Or–












