Battle in Seattle is a 2007 political action-thriller film written and directed by Stuart Townsend, in his directorial debut. The story is loosely based on the protest activity at the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2007. It later screened at the Seattle International Film Festival in May 2008 and received a limited theatrical release on September 19, 2008.

The film depicts the protest in 1999, as thousands of activists arrive in Seattle, Washington in masses to protest the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999. Protesters believe the World Trade Organization contributes to widening the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, while the WTO claims to be fixing the disparity and decreasing world hunger, disease, and death.

The movie takes an in-depth look at several fictional characters during those five days in 1999 as demonstrators protested the meeting of the WTO in Seattle's streets. The movie portrays conflicts between the peaceful protesters and people committing property destruction whose actions were widely covered by the media. Although the protest began peacefully with a goal of stopping the WTO talks, police began teargassing the crowd after it refused to clear the streets and the situation escalated into a full-scale riot and a State of Emergency that pitted protesters against the Seattle Police Department and the Washington National Guard.

Though the film is based on actual events, the characters are fictional.

In 2002, Townsend became interested in making a film about the 1999 WTO protests when he read Anita Roddick's Take It Personally, a book about globalization that contained an essay about the event. "The story interested me because the WTO considers a lot of issues that were diffused somewhat by 9/11," he said. For research, Townsend read a number of books related to the event, including No Logo by Naomi Klein, Noreena Hertz's Silent Takeover, Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization, Joeseph Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work, and Alexander Cockburn's Five Days that Shook the World. Townsend said, "My overall sense, just as a human being studying it all, I found that the people who advocated free trade, that kind of economic-shock therapy, I really found that hard to digest. I didn’t agree with them, and I ended up very much agreeing with the protesters asking for labor rights and good working standards, and good environmental standards, and safety standards."

When Townsend began showing an early draft of the script to studios in the early 2000s, he could not find anyone willing to finance the film. He spent the next year retuning the script as he looked for producers. After making a fifteen-minute proof-of-concept film that spliced together three different documentaries, Townsend finally got the green-light to begin filming.

Major influences for Townsend were the documentary This Is What Democracy Looks Like, the 1969 film Medium Cool, and the 1976 film Network. Townsend wanted to experiment with different film styles, such as playing with montage, docudrama style, and combining shot footage with actual footage. He decided on an ensemble structure for the film while he was retuning the script. One of the misconceptions about the protests he wanted to counter in the film was that police officers began attacking the protesters only after the protesters became violent. Townsend said,

"Time and again, it was said that the police sprayed and pepper-gassed innocent, peaceful demonstrators. Time and again in the media, it was always referenced as the violent anarchists, and then the police responded, to which the mayor says, 'The police responded appropriately.' I wanted to give that context, show that the mayor makes that decision, and the police do gas indiscriminately. And then, yes, anarchists come smashing around, and the police continue. That was a very, very important distinction. I think that was probably the one major issue that activists had problems with in regards to mainstream media."