When Father Christopher Hartley arrived in the Dominican Republic, he was told not to go into the sugar plantation fields where most of his parishioners worked. It took him three months to muster the courage to do so. It's taken the bulk of his life since to try to do something about what he found there.

The first and most surprising thing he found was that growing and harvesting sugar in the D.R. is done almost entirely by workers from Haiti, the impoverished stepchild nation with which the D.R. shares the island of Hispaniola. You can imagine the conditions.

In case you can't, "The Price of Sugar" unveils them in straightforward, unsensational documentary fashion: The labor is backbreaking. The cane is hand-cut by machete.

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'The Price of Sugar'

• Narrator: Paul Newman.
• Rating: PG-13 in nature.
• Movie trailer: www.imdb.com

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Most work barefoot, under armed guard. They're not allowed to leave the plantations.

They work 14-hour days, seven days a week, for 90 cents a day.

They are essentially slaves -- 200 miles from the United States. Most of their product ends up on our tables, blithely stirred into our coffee (and just about everything else we eat and drink) at a bargain-basement price.

We get the bargain. They get the basement.

Some 30,000 Haitians are lured across the border every harvest season by the promise of good jobs, joining the million or so of their brethren who live more or less full time -- and illegally -- in the D.R. They live there with little or no access to decent housing, medical care, electricity, clean water or education.

Narrator Paul Newman's raspy voice takes us through the painful social and historical paces: The country's big sugar companies are controlled by the powerful Vicini family barons (who have hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to thwart this film's release or at least "spin" its fallout). Challenging them and their profits is charismatic Father Hartley, who has a highly unusual pedigree. His father was a British industrialist, his mother came from an aristocratic family in Spain.

He worked with, and was inspired by, Mother Teresa in India before taking up his work among the poor in the Dominican Republic.

Director Bill Haney shows us Hartley's remonstrations with the authorities, his efforts to build houses for the workers and his dangerous attempts to organize them (as per their "right" to do so, guaranteed by Vatican II). Protesters, meanwhile, carry signs reading "Out with the priest!" -- reflecting the fear, resentment and hatred of Haitians that have long been part of Dominican society.

It's the same grim racial and economic hostility found everywhere, based on who's poorer, who's sicker, who's blacker. The lower you go, you always look for somebody lower.

"Nothing in this world is going to stop me," says the padre, not even death threats. Indeed, this priest would seem to be actively inviting martyrdom, with director Haney's complicity. There's a strange, rather creepy pre-assassination feel to the documentary, as well as a visually evocative vibrancy.

Yankee tourists, meanwhile, work on their tans on pristine Dominican beaches, oblivious to the exploitation just yonder, on the other side of the dunes. Haitians are stripped of their identity cards along with their rights when they arrive. Neither the American government nor American businesses exert their potential influence for amelioration. No capitalist incentive to do so.

No equal time for the sugar barons' side of the story, either. (They declined to be interviewed.) But despite its objective deficiencies, "The Price of Sugar" forces us to examine -- and consider our own responsibilities toward -- the bitter human price of the sweet stuff we consume.

Come to think of it, the situation of America's own illegal immigrants differs mostly by degree.

At Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room, North Oakland, Friday through Sunday.