In honor of the 20th Anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) and Jill Freidberg invite you to join them for a retrospective exhibit and video presentation.

In November 1999, tens of thousands of people filled Seattle’s streets to protest the World Trade Organization. For an entire week, the whole world watched as grassroots activists, labor, environmentalists, farmers, anarchists, and artists made history.

Throughout that week, a new organization, Seattle Independent Media Center (IMC) collected and logged 300 hours of video footage, shot by over 100 independent videographers who had come to Seattle to document the marches, direct action, teach-ins, rallies, and coalition-building that defined that week. IMC co-founder and Seattle filmmaker, Jill Freidberg, became the caretaker of that video collection, storing crates of Betacam SP videotapes in her home for the past 20 years.

4Culture recently provided a grant to digitize 40 hours from that collection, as the first step in a long-term strategy for preserving and creating access to an archive of independent videotape footage from the 1999 WTO protests through University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections. Hidden until now, the archive offers King County residents a unique glimpse into a historic moment that shaped social justice movements in the region and around the world.

This event will include excerpts from the IMC video archive, along with an exhibit of archival ephemera from the Labor Archives of Washington (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections).