An Interview with Alex Megaro, Producer of 'WTO/99'

In 1999, thousands of individuals from different backgrounds gathered in Seattle, Washington to protest the meeting of the World Trade Organization, an international body whose ultra free trade aspirations represented a threat to domestic manufacturing industries, workers’ rights and the natural environment. Within a few hours of exercising their assembly rights, the protestors were met with a brutal crackdown by local police.

This pivotal yet misrepresented clash between activists and authorities was captured in large part through the lenses of news crews, but also by amateur videographers, whose analog tapes have gradually been digitized via local archiving efforts. A multi-year compilation of this footage for an audience-friendly package then came to the fore, resulting in the feature-length “real time” documentary WTO/99. The film is currently entertaining a legendary festival run, and has been lauded with best documentary nominations and prizes across the U.S. and abroad.

I spoke with producer Alex Megaro, one half of the film’s editing duo, about the project's journey and the archival work that made it possible.

Note: this transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Lydia Smith: You’re coming off a wonderful festival run. Where have you all been this week and last?

Alex Megaro: We were just in New Orleans – the New Orleans Film Festival – which was really exciting. We ended up winning their Best Documentary Feature award, which was crazy unexpected. We’ve always said, as this movie starts winning awards, it’s a very bad sign for the country, so I think it’s reflective. 

[On November 9], we were at the Critics Choice Awards, which was insane to be nominated for Best Archival Doc there. And what was so cool is that we were seated at a table next to this Polish director named Maciej Drygas, who is a legend in Poland, and I kept joking 'he’s the one I want to meet!' And we were seated literally right next to him. I took photos with him. So very fortunate, very cool.

LS: Is this your first major festival run for a film you’ve produced?

AM: I’ve been fortunate where I’ve worked on fiction films as well as docs, and I’ve had some successful runs, both with – there was a feature that I personally edited called Driftwood, came out in 2016, premiered at Slamdance, won their Grand Jury Prize there. It had a pretty great run throughout that year, and then shorts I directed two years ago that had an amazing run for almost two years.

But this is the first feature doc that I’ve been involved in. It’s Ian [Bell]’s directorial debut for a feature, and we’ve been incredibly fortunate. It’s been surprising and unexpected but very heartening that the movie is resonating with all kinds of people.

LS: I know your director and collaborator, Ian, is from Seattle, which creates [his] connection to the material. Could you summarize your personal journey to making a film about the WTO protests, and how informed you were about this particular movement prior to working with the footage?

AM: For sure. I mean, I’ll just also summarize Ian’s case – obviously he is from Seattle, but he had a unique journey with it as well, which was that he grew up there, but he was living abroad when the protests actually happened. And so he was receiving letters and dispatches and news from friends who were taking part in it, and what he was hearing was very different from the media narrative that was going on. So, he became extremely interested, both as something he wasn’t able to participate in, but something that he knew that there was a truth that wasn’t coming out about.

I’ve often teased him that going through 1000 hours of archival footage over two and a half years to make a movie about the party you didn’t get to attend is a little overkill – like, ultimate FOMO. But you know, there are real reasons, too.

What’s interesting is, to contrast that with my experience: I’m a little younger, and it was a blip on the news when I was 12. You’d hear at night – I’m on the east coast, and I grew up there – that a Starbucks window was broken, and I was supposed to feel really bad about that for some reason. And it’s kind of the only thing I heard about. But it was a thing where, as I got older – even when I was young – that felt odd. You start seeing that there was something much greater [or] much more important happening. It was kind of purposely buried so we wouldn’t know about the truth of the matter, and the media focus and the talking points about it could be strictly about the “anarchists” who were breaking windows and causing a ruckus, rather than showing what the actual event was, which was a massive, successful – in many regards – collective action to push back against power. 

But, you know, the media can’t allow us to know that collective action can be successful in any form. It doesn’t want us to know it’s even feasible and that cross-class coalition can be feasible. 

The story just became sensationalized: broken windows.

So, my interest stems from wanting to explore that, mixed with – Ian and I had been working in making archival films for some time. We had a short documentary series at Vice called Source Material, and they were kind of bite-sized versions of what you see in WTO. We were honing that style, it was fully archival, same deal, no interviews, no voiceover, just made up of footage, reconstructing events from many different angles. And we were honing a style as well without realizing that we were doing it, and [WTO] was our white whale project that we were pitching for many years – [we] couldn’t get funding. And when we were able to, we kind of had the largest palette, so to speak, that we’ve ever had for an event that we were reconstructing because the archive was so vast. 

On a technical level, that was something we wanted to try, too: what can we do when we have this much footage? When we’re in a very unique position to have multiple angles of so many specific events that were going on that we had this very rare ability to edit as if it was a fiction film and [as if] we had set up cameras from different angles. We can do continuity editing because so many people were there. It was interesting on that level, but it was also such an important event in both of our minds, and the real or honest history of it hadn’t really been portrayed on screen as well as it could have. So we wanted to almost make it as a historical corrective.

LS: I was very interested in the fact that a lot of this footage is coming from an analog era. You mentioned during the Q&A [at DC/DOX in July] that a lot of times the news filmmakers wouldn’t be able to preserve the live footage as it was coming out, so someone recording it at home would be a lucky provider of the footage later on. I believe you shared an anecdote about someone finding footage under the stairs. Could you recount that particular story?

AM: I think it’s a mix of some of our stories. I can get into all of that. The main archive that makes up the backbone of the film is the Independent Media Center (IMC) archive housed at the University of Washington, which was the media center that you see in the film. There’s many people who were part of that who come through the film – you see the inside of the media center very briefly in the film – but this archive stems mostly from a single person who had been preserving all this footage, who had been collecting tapes for 20 plus years. They were the one who was storing them in a box in their basement, but had them for many, many years. 

Some of [the footage] got digitized shortly after the protest, and those make up some of the early documentaries about all this. But this collection that they had came out to almost 400 hours of footage, most of which had not been seen by the public.

This being preserved for 20 plus years – the foresight of this person to do that was a huge part of this project, to know that this was so important [so as] to collect all this footage for so much time and preserve it when they weren’t actively digitizing it. They just knew, one day, they can keep this important footage and eventually get it digitized.

So for us, we were fortunate in that when we got the financing for the project was right when all of this [footage] was being digitized for the first time. So it all converged at the right time. The footage from the IMC archive makes up maybe half of the movie, the final product – from there, we had people who Ian knew in Seattle, [who] found out this project was happening and would say 'I’ve got 20 tapes in my basement. Do you want ‘em?' That kept happening to the point where we’d go 'oh that’s amazing, 20 more tapes… ah shit, 20 more tapes we gotta watch.'

It was snowballing for so long, mixed with our amazing archival producer named Debra McClutchy. She came aboard and helped track down so much more because she has relationships and connections with all kinds of larger archives, and the skill and the know-how to do deeper searches than we ever could. In the end, we came out to roughly 1000 hours of footage in total which is a lot of footage.

But back to your point about the local news footage. Something that was amazing – this was part of the 400 hours of the IMC archive – in the film you see that there’s a lot of local news. We’re able to do these real-time media checks, so to speak, where we show how the local news is reporting a thing at that very moment, and then you go to someone on the street who’s just there with a camcorder, and you see it from their vantage point at that same moment. And you can see how the narrative is not always quite true, to put it mildly.

And that’s only possible because someone had been taping the local news off of the TV every night on the VCR and happened to save those tapes, happened to eventually give it to this person who’s preserving all of them, and it happened 20 years later to get digitized. 

The trajectory of how that footage reaches a digitization point and then comes into our hands is nuts because there are so many roadblocks that could have prevented this.

To your point, too, the reason it was so valuable is because it’s the only – as far as we’re aware – the only record of these local news reports in existence because local news didn’t often preserve their tapes because there are archival fees [or] the costs are too high for a small local news org, so they’d eventually wipe them and put on new shows. So this was a treasure trove, and it was so informative. It would be a very different movie if we didn’t have that footage. It’s a testament to the train of archivists that probably wouldn’t call themselves archivists, professionally, but they were archivists and they were saving this footage that was so important. 

It just took many different people, a mix of accidents and people thinking with some foresight – but it’s still a miracle that it exists and we had access to it.

LS: Was it always your intention to reconstruct the events purely out of archival footage, or did you have a back-up plan to use talking heads or any kind of narrative aids?

AM: We were never going to use talking heads. Ian and I like to make it as hard for ourselves as possible. But no – the way we worked on Source Material, our Vice series, was the same thing. We’d say, ‘how do we reconstruct these events with no voiceover, no interviews, no reflections from many years later going ‘yeah it was bad when the cops gassed me in the face 20 years ago?’’ when the immediacy of the footage, if you can find the way to harness and edit it in a coherent, flowing fashion, can be much more powerful. It’s just very hard to make that work.

We were editing for two and a half years – it’s a 1000 hour archive – but we always intended it to be purely archival. 

We approach it as ‘this is a historical artifact’ and all edits – all the work we put into the construction – is in service of that artifact. 

We tried to keep it as honest and as objective as one feasibly can while still making and editing a film to the point where our rigid chronology which we adhered to for this film, we tried to never break that. So we’d never take a shot that occurred three hours later from an event, put it three hours earlier just because that shot heightened the drama or blended in perfectly. We would just say ‘we can’t do it’. What you’re seeing in the film is what’s happening at that moment on screen – that’s when everything is happening. We stuck to that rigid chronology to create this artifact that could hopefully inform people. Hopefully people can walk away going ‘I understand why these protests happened, I understand the events of it in those ensuing days’.

There are a lot of issues in these protests, so it’s a complicated info-dump on a new viewer. I do think we attempted to provide as much clarity as possible, but we wanted it to work on two levels in that sense: one is this educational, factual, ‘you’re going to learn what happened, why it happened, what the different sides were on these issues’. The second is to work on an experiential level, where you can feel what it was like to be on the streets during these protests. 

And because all of this footage – the non-news footage – is first-person on the street, immediate, someone with a camera [is] often just getting attacked by the police or capturing it right next to them. And so that experiential level helps someone understand this big event on an emotional level, which I think fills in some blanks that maybe couldn’t be articulated. It does give them a larger understanding of it while also, in that experience, you’re getting extra snippets of people discussing the issues on the street.

If the initial info-dump, so to speak, is a little dense for a new viewer, they’re going to pick up the further details as the movie goes on, but they’re going to be doing it while experiencing the event itself. 

It’s a very unique way of portraying something like this. I just think that was a testament to the amount of footage we had. It gave us opportunities we wouldn’t normally have because there were so many viewpoints that we could pull from, including footage that the cops themselves shot. They were out there with camcorders, and we could show their POV, which was unexpected and not common.

LS: It’s very successfully conveyed. I was curious, based on Ian’s connections in Seattle, if you ever came across some of the people who were interviewed in the film or maybe heard about the project and relayed their first-person stories, if not for the film itself, but just for your own background while stitching together the stories?

AM: Ian was doing some interviews while we were making the film because he was talking to locals in Seattle who did participate. It was more of just a historical record – it was never intended to be used for the film, it was for us to further understand what was going on, but also, just to have them recorded, because that oral history is very important. Since then, though, many people who have participated have seen the film and the general consensus is just amazing to hear.

At almost every screening that I’ve been to so far in the festival run, at least one person comes up to us and says ‘I was there’ and then tells us their personal story about it. Then sometimes they recognize themselves on screen, in like one shot, and they get very excited. Recently, Mike Dolin, who is one of the organizers of the entire protest, saw it and loved it. I think he thanked us for bringing back his PTSD. But he said it was worth it, and that this is something that needs to be seen.

LS: And that’s a great quote to put on the front of the poster, no?

AM (laughing): He was adamant.

LS: From a logistics standpoint, you had the 1000 hours [of footage], you worked on this for over two and a half years, so there’s a lot to it, but could you very briefly summarize how you shared footage responsibilities and editing?

AM: That’s our PTSD.

Ian and I have worked together and edited together almost a decade at this point. Through working on our previous archival series, you form a shorthand, and you form a process that just seems to work for you. We jumped in almost without having to discuss certain particulars, which is the benefit of having worked together for so long.

We didn’t split up footage insofar as we both watched this 1000 hours over, and over, and over.

We would both do it because we both wanted to understand as much as we could, and you know, it’s the 1000 hours – it’s going to be fatiguing at some point. I’ll catch something he might miss on the first pass, and vis versa.

Once we nailed down the structure – I don’t know if it made it easier, but we did give ourselves rules by doing this, because at first we didn’t know how we [were] going to do this, ‘are we going to jump in time? Are we going to go back and forth?’ Interviews were never part of it, but structurally, you get that much footage, and you don’t know, necessarily, how you want to attack it at first. When we decided we were going to go strictly chronological, you experience the ebb and flow to a historical reality rather than us trying to create a dramatic arc, especially because Day One has this extreme violence that, in a typical film, you might be using as a “climax.”

But for us it was interesting to see how that affected the rest of the days, and how that initial violence put a pall over the proceedings for the next four days, how it affected the conference, how it affected the protestors, how the relationship with the protestors and the cops and the government kept evolving based on this.

Once we set on that structure, [Ian] would just take ‘Morning of Day One’ and I would work on ‘Evening of Day One’, and we’d split up, hour by hour or sometimes portions of a day, edit that, and then we’d send it back and forth. Something we found is, in our collaboration, if I’m working on a timeline, I’ve never sent him a project and then he would work on it and [it would] ever come back worse. And vis versa. 

When we share, it always seems to come back a little better and a little better. We have this kind of symbiotic brain for editing. We both have our strengths that we can then apply to it. 

He’s the best collaborator. I love working with him.

LS: That’s incredible. I can’t imagine tackling this kind of project alone, so it’s great that you have someone to “see through” the mundane task of looking at footage.

AM: It would be impossible alone. But even we think, “it was still only two of us doing that. It’s still crazy.” But thankfully we have each other.

LS: Aside from the exhaustive work of sitting behind a computer screen, what other kinds of challenges did you encounter in the making of the film? In past interviews you talked about legal issues and getting rights to footage. I know you were licensed some of the footage by a local CBS affiliate – did any of the other clip providers have guidelines for how the images were presented in context? 

AM: Yeah, they did. I mean, it's kind of standard rules for the way that network footage tends to be, how it's necessitated you use it, and sometimes you provide context to them within the edit. You send them the final cut and show some context on either side of their clips, just so they know you're not misrepresenting them. And I mean, that's how all larger networks tend to work, or many of them. So that was not so much a challenge because we were, like I said, we were trying to be as honest as possible with this film. 

The financial aspect – you know, archival licensing is very expensive, so that is, that does or is taken into account. And then, you know, an example of this, which is kind of interesting, came up recently as we were editing our trailer. 

The way much of this is licensed and pre-decided – certain archives already have their parameters set, and so we legally can't use much of it for promotion, so editing a trailer became much more challenging. We couldn't just choose anything from our film. But then it forced us to become creative, and I think we came out with something kind of unexpectedly powerful, given how little footage from the actual film we could use. 

So those are things that do arise, but otherwise I would say, like benign challenges – untangling legal things that our archival producer is an incredible at, just helping make that a smoother process while Ian and I can keep working.

I would say the sound mix was challenging insofar as so much of the footage [was] shot on old camcorders or early digital video. It's almost solely on board camera mics. It sounded like shit by the time we had a completed cut. But we have a genius sound mixer. His name is Barbaros Ali Kaynak. I'm stunned at what he's capable of, and he did an unbelievable job bringing out sounds that were in the distance. Sometimes, after he would do a pass on the mix, I was like, ‘I didn't even hear that person saying that’. And he wasn’t recreating voices using AI tools – he was just able to give clarity to it. 

And I should also add, we never added sound effects that weren't on screen. 

If you heard an explosion, it was the one that happened at that moment in the protest. You know, maybe it came from a different angle and like a camera was closer to something, and then we're showing it in a distant one. But if you hear an explosion, you hear a gunshot from the cops, it's that specific shot at that moment. We never amped it up in that sense. But he did clean the audio to a degree where it sounds incredible, given this is onboard microphones within chaos, and there's always background noise, and you're there around 40,000 people, and you're getting all of that leaking in. So he just did a stunning job.

LS: That's a really good point. I can only imagine the quality of the sound that you were starting with on those old devices.

AM: To his credit, he did the initial mix in, I think it was 19 days, which… I don’t know how he did it. It’s such an achievement. I can’t sing his praises enough. 

LS: Since you brought up AI tools, I was curious if you used any tools for the sorting of the clips or if it was purely manual.

AM: It was 100% manual. It’s literally taking the tape, dropping it on a timeline, watching it, logging it – it’s a lot of spreadsheets. Me manually filling in spreadsheets while also making selects. We didn’t use AI in any form, at all. It’s one of those things where – because Ian and I need to see everything, we need to organize it. I’m not against bringing in interns on projects or assistant editors, but in this case, because we’re the ones constructing this, we need to form that “conspiracy web” in our brains. It might be something we saw months ago, but one of us recognizes, ‘oh, the person in this tape shows up in this tape that we’re now seeing five months later’. 

But that’s also why we watch the initial archive and have to just keep watching it and kind of massaging it, learning who the characters are. It’s tedious in a sense but you’re always accruing more knowledge both visually and in terms of the narrative arc of the film. 

LS: I think that really comes through – the humanity of the edit, if that makes sense. It could only ever be human labor that produced that outcome.

AM: Yeah, I don’t know how you could make those connections unless you’re deeply involved with that footage and know how to stitch it together, but also in an engaging sense. You’re always editing on multiple levels, and yet we still kept it as this artifact first, and every edit, every choice, is in service of that. There’s some great scenes that were very tightly edited that happened, maybe, in the evening of Day One and it kind of becomes redundant because it’s a similar thing that we saw earlier. Well, it’s just not necessary to put in the film at that point. We’ve made our point, we’ve shown this kind of incident and the audience – it’s just going to be pummeling them at that point, maybe frivolously. We were making hard choices in that regard too.

LS: You worked on a different film about the [2021] insurrection, which is compiled of more recent footage. What is the biggest difference between assembling footage from 2021 versus 1999?

AM: It's twofold. One, the approach for the 187 Minutes doc was different because we used a lot of – not split screen, but sometimes people were shooting vertical iPhone footage, and we'd have six simultaneously on the screen. [It] was structured once again, chronologically, and we would track down [footage] within a minute of when every clip you're seeing happens. So we have a clock on screen, and once again, it was very rigidly chronological, but we would use multi-panel things so you can see maybe five or six angles of what’s happening at that minute. 

But the real thing is the difference in how people shoot now. People weren't doing selfie-cam setups back in ‘99. I think the style of shooting with a smartphone has evolved, and it's different. And I don't want to say it's any less important capturing something now – [it’s] in many ways even more important to constantly capture stuff. But there was a different kind of intention. 

When people went to the protest in ‘99 with a camcorder, it was a physical object. You're tied to it the whole day. I think many went with a mission to do it, while now, it's – again, just as, if not more important to be capturing these kinds of things – [but] I feel like there is just a more casual way of doing it. 

And yet, you still find some people who are amazing cinematographers using phone footage – maybe less of that during January 6, but we also edited many pieces that was comprised mostly of recent cell phone footage for that series at Vice and the style of shooting is just different. And I found that the footage in 99, probably stemming from that intention of going to shoot a thing, it feels like there's more discipline [for them to do] the best that they could. I mean, there's sometimes citizen journalists, actual journalists, and news cameramen, and then amateurs, for sure. But they went with that intention. 

There's more chaos in the way people shoot now. When you always have a camera in your pocket, that ability, the casualness, can both be a huge asset to how you capture an event. It varies from person to person, event to event, but specifically for the January 6 one, so much of it was selfie cameras from the participants live streaming, or sometimes just acting as an influencer. Maybe they were going to post it later. But it was peculiar because it was a selfie cam going, ‘this is my name. These are the crimes I'm going to commit. Now, watch me do the crimes,’ and then they film themselves doing the crimes. It's kind of baffling – the ignorance of how being that open could maybe affect you negatively in the future. Or, though, I guess they're all being pardoned now.

LS: I was thinking about [the aftermath of the WTO protests] in the context of 9/11, which is a big shift marker for organized protests in the US, and then also the pandemic, because it coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement. But I wasn't sure if you saw any other markers or revitalizations of this particular form of activism in exception to those two events.

AM: I mean, revitalization – I don't know if I'd say that. I think that it goes in cycles. Obviously, yeah, the George Floyd protests were huge, and it coinciding with Covid-19, helped expand it. I think what's been really interesting and inspiring is [the] activists, who now are pushing back against ICE, but they're also the same groups that were part of the campus encampment protests and Gaza protests. They see this film, and they're often – it's a younger contingent – and they always tell me that ‘this film is such an inspiring and galvanizing film to us, because we're out there now.’ [They’re] dealing with – maybe it's a campus administration, maybe it is with a local government repressing their activism regarding genocide in Gaza, maybe advocating for BDS or something like that. 

But they're seeing a unity, a class unity, that we're told is impossible. And I think the genocide issue being so black and white to some of these people has, I hope, eradicated some of the more petty infighting that can happen, especially among leftist groups. And it's united people because they're like, ‘this is such an extreme evil that we can put our silly differences aside and go against it’.

And that they see this mentality reflected in the protesters in this film, which was across class and political spectrum, the coalition of far-Left groups to libertarians and union guys and normies on the street and college students. And that it's been so inspiring to them, is very heartening, obviously, for us as filmmakers, because we make this [film], [we] put it out in the world. You don't know the effect it's going to have, but I think it says a lot about what people are craving and how protest culture – I don't know – it's always changing in some way.

I do think these same younger activists and organizers are seeing now [that] everything's getting ramped up, and they saw the trajectory in this film – a movie where, fortunately, no one was killed during these protests, [but] there were a lot of injuries.

We know how much worse it could have been, and many of us are experiencing how bad it can and will get. Seeing what was possible back then has definitely affected people. Hopefully they can apply that to whatever protest culture is at this point, or just in their own activism, and hopefully can apply it in a positive way.

LS: What is next for WTO/ 99? I know you have a few more festivals in December. Have you been on the distribution train at all?

AM: Yeah, we have a few more festival screenings coming up, and we are self-distributing, so we have our proper theatrical premiere, which will be a week at DCTV in Manhattan beginning December 5. That's going to run from the 5th to the 11th. We're also going to be playing many showings in Seattle, and we're booking a lot of one-off event screenings and limited runs all over the country. That's going for a while. We plan to keep this theatrical only into next year, for sure. We're also doing university and educational screenings, and we also offer it to activist groups. So we've done screenings with DSA chapters, we've done it with other activist groups, and we offer it with, you know, if I can't be there in person, at least, with a Zoom Q&A.

I tell everyone to if there's any group who wants this to be seen, go to our website wto99doc.com – hit us up on the form and message us. Say you'd love for your group to see it. We'll try to work something out. Or if you want it in your city, let us know. We're a tiny, tiny independent team doing this, so we're just getting it out whatever ways we can. So far, responses to how many people want to see it, and so far, we've been doing pretty well getting, you know, booking showings and whatnot. And hopefully it just keeps growing once the proper theatrical premiere happens. I advocate for everyone: email us if they want to see it.

Since this interview was recorded, WTO/99 has been nominated for Best Editing at the International Documentary Awards. Explore their website to locate a screening near you.

-Lydia