There's a significant difference between poverty and pauperization: The former is an existing condition, the latter is actively (if not intentionally) caused. Much evidence -- and probable cause -- suggest that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are doing more damage than good to people in Africa. But what's to be done about it? Poor people can't put rich financial institutions on trial.

Except in "Bamako." The title is also the location -- Mali's dusty capital city. The event, staged by director Abderrahmane Sissako, is a mock public trial of the economic organizations that are ravaging contemporary Africa while affecting to aid it.

We saw a somewhat similar approach to problem-solving with Ousmane Sembene's "Moolaade" (2004), in which self-appointed citizens took up the case of female mutilation. Such exercises in indigenous democracy are not uncommon in African village life.

Here, the manifestation (and conceit) is a more formal proceeding, held in the courtyard of a busy neighborhood. Two articulate white Frenchmen serve as chief advocates -- Roland Rappoport for the institutional defendants, William Bourdon for the African plaintiffs -- but the greatest eloquence comes from Malian lawyer Aissata Tall Sall, whose truths are more than inconvenient:

Mali lacks any real transportation system, communications, public services or energy supplies. Indeed, it can hardly even be called a sovereign country, unable as it is to develop industry or social supports with the little money left from paying interest on its IMF debts (40 percent of the payments). Multinational corporations own virtually all its assets and natural resources, which have been sold off or "privatized" (even water and schools).

Debt "forgiveness"? Chimerical. World Bank policies and the people's miseries remain the same. Life expectancy has fallen to under 50. Infant mortality is rising. This year, 42,000 will die of cholera and millions of malaria -- preventable diseases eradicated in Europe and America. Demographic dislocation is horrendous.

Things in Bamako went to hell when the railway shut down. One man testifies he was among a group of 30 -- in the exodus of people facing "structural adjustment" -- who walked from Niger to Algeria, through the Sahara Desert, in search of work. Ten of them made it.

Yet it's not all gloom and doom. Village life goes on, in and around the courtyard courtroom, intercut with the trial: Sissako focuses on beautiful Mele (Aissa Maiga), a popular club singer whose marriage to unemployed Chaka (Tiecoura Traore) is falling apart. People go about their business, or lack of it. The women still practice their hand-ginned cotton-dyeing trade, even though it has been largely destroyed by the craftily "globalized" Chinese.

"They copy our textiles!" -- at a fraction of the cost and quality -- someone laments. "Even America trembles before China. What about little Mali?"

The villagers tune in and out of the trial (being broadcast on local radio), and of their TV sets: Sissako's most grotesquely ironic touch is the insertion of an incongruous TV western called "Death in Timbukto," starring ("Bamako's" own producer) Danny Glover and Palestinian fimmaker Elia Suleiman as tongue-in-cheek cowboys, mindlessly shooting each other and innocent bystanders on pseudo-African soil.

Sissako theoretically presents both sides of the dialectic, but "Bamako" is at heart an anti-capitalist polemic. On rampant African "corruption," so lamented by the IMF and World Bank, for example: Why is it corruption for a local African honcho -- but not for Paul Wolfowitz -- to help his girlfriend?

In any case, this confrontational, illuminating indictment of G8 neo-colonialist globalization policies is tempered by the warmth with which it captures Mali's people (kudos to Jacques Besse's cinematography). Two wonderful Aissa Maiga songs bracket the film, which is in French and Bambara (the Malian language), with subtitles.

"Bamako" is a moving -- if imaginary -- courtroom drama. You won't be surprised by the verdict, which is a foregone conclusion, but I think you'll approve of the nonviolent sentence.

Opens Friday at the Harris.