Reviewed by Dani Barley
Direct Action Website

http://directaction.org.au/issue6/battle_in_seattle

By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNet
September 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/101027/

By Brian Cook, InTheseTimes

About halfway through Battle in Seattle, writer/director Stuart Townsend's cinematic dramatization of the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, a group of activists are watching a local TV station's coverage of the explosive events on the streets. Upon hearing the confrontations between the protesters and the police dubbed "The Battle in Seattle," one of the activists derisively scoffs, "Battle in Seattle? Sounds like a monster truck show!"

by Sarahjane Blum
The Brooklyn Rail: critical perspectives on arts politics and culture

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/10/film/new-social-moviements

FILM REVIEW / NICOLE WALLENBROCK.
The GC Advocate; student paper of the CUNY Graduate Center
http://gcadvocate.org/index.php/view/00358/Putting-the-bad-in-the-battle...

Battle in Seattle
An Interview with Stuart Townsend

by Andrew Hedden

Stuart Townsend

On November 30, 1999, another cold, gray, and wet day in Seattle, Washington was transformed into a date in history. A broad network of 50,000 organized demonstrators, representing the concerns of labor, environmentalists, the global South and many others, effectively shut down the ministerial of the World Trade Organization. Police responses quickly spun out of control, and the National Guard was called in as the protests continued for several days afterwards.

“AND WHAT ABOUT TOMORROW?”
Anarchist Resistance and the “Blockbusterization” of Reality…

For pdf version designed to be handed out at movie showings go to:
http://shiftshapers.gnn.tv/blogs/29511/_And_What_About_Tomorrow_An_Anarc...

SF Activists Had Hand in Making of "Battle of Seattle"
However, Hollywood Hype Overarches Movie

by R. Robertson
Tuesday Sep 30th, 2008
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/30/18542059.php

Red-hot in a ruby designer gown, Actress Cherize Theron gushed praise on mainstream media television for her director boyfriend at the opening of "Battle in Seattle". The wall paper behind her screamed not-so-subtle product placement for couture fashion house Christian Dior. Contrast this with the causes Theron claims to clamor for: poverty, injustice, and misery around the world.

By Ezra Klein
guardian.co.uk, Friday September 26 2008

Of the fissures running through the American left, the deepest, and most impenetrable, is probably trade. Free traders argue that global commerce is the single greatest anti-poverty programme the human race has devised. Fair traders argue that the reality is rather more complicated, and that free trade deals are corporate welfare packages that leave behind economic immiseration, environmental devastation and an impoverished civil sector.

AFL-CIO Blog Film Review: See ‘Battle in Seattle’
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/09/22/film-review-see-battle-in-seattle

Barb Kucera, editor of Workday Minnesota, reviews the movie “Battle in Seattle,” which opened Sept. 19 in selected theaters around the country. If the initial two-week limited release attracts a large audience, the film will be distributed nationwide.

With the recent street clashes at the Republican National Convention and the current multibillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the timing for the release of “Battle in Seattle” couldn’t be better.

by Mark Engler

The 1999 protests against the WTO were dramatic enough to inspire a new feature film, but did they actually make a difference?

Nine years after the World Trade Organization came to Seattle, a new feature film sets out to dramatize the historic protests that the institution’s meetings provoked. The issue that Battle in Seattle filmmaker Stuart Townsend seeks to raise, as he recently stated, is “[what it takes] to create real and meaningful change.”

By Brian Miller
Published on September 17, 2008

Battle in Seattle: With A-List Cast, New Film Re-Creates Historic Protest Against WTO

In November 1999, tens of thousands of global justice activists, environmentalists, union members and anti-capitalist activists helped shutdown the World Trade Organization in Seattle. It was a watershed moment for the movement against corporate globalization. The story of the Seattle protests has now been turned into a fictionalized film featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. We speak to the film’s writer and director, Stuart Townsend, as well as David Solnit, one of the key organizers of the WTO protests and co-founder of the Seattle WTO People’s History Project.
Listen to the segment

I spent my nineteenth birthday in the cold and rain, breathing in tear gas and fleeing the police. It was 1999 and I was in Seattle, joining in the tens of thousands who descended on the city to protest the World Trade Organization’s first Ministerial Conference in the United States. I was sympathetic to the myriad of issues represented by the various sections of protestors, from the environment to workers struggles to access to medicine. I proudly marched with my banner reading, “Think the WTO is bad?

http://smartmeme.org/blog/?p=10

Nearly 10 years ago in late November 1999, I was one of the over 50,000 activists from different movements around the world who converged on Seattle to confront the World Trade Organization. We had come together to challenge the slickly packaged agenda of “free trade,” and the WTO’s effort to enshrine the power and profits of multinational corporations as the organizing principle of a new global order. The mass non-violent actions which shut down the opening day of the meeting (and the subsequent collapse of the Ministerial talks) marked a major milestone in the ongoing struggles for global justice, democracy, peace and ecological sanity.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/archives/139502.asp?from=b...

Stuart Townsend is telling the story of the 1999 WTO protests in a big-name film. The protesters, unsure that it's the right one, are telling it on a Web site -- and, in the case of David Solnit, in a book.

"Given that distortion of the history of the protests, Stuart's movie is very welcome, it's much closer to the truth," said Solnit, a WTO protester and lifelong activist who advised Townsend on the movie's script.

Friday, May 23, 2008
http://moviepie.blogspot.com/2008/05/siff-1-battle-in-seattle-for-openin...

Shoot, it seems like a couple months ago that SIFF just ended, but here we are at the beginning of a new, month-long orgy of movie-ness that is The Seattle International Film Festival! Now, normally I don't go to Opening Night, mainly because no one hands me a free ticket (you have to admit, $50 is pretty steep). But this year was different for a couple reasons:

Sunday February 24, 2008

By Paula Geraghty

Townsend's interpretation of the famous Battle in Seattle, where the World Trade Organisation was shut down due to the emergence of what the media labelled the anti-globalisation movement has finally hit the big screen, and it doesn't get much bigger (in Dublin) than the prestigous Savoy Screen Number 1!