“Bamako,” the new film by the highly regarded Mali-based director Abderrahmane Sissako, is a work of fantasy, but not of the escapist variety. Set in the sprawling courtyard of a Malian home, the film, which opens today at Film Forum, stages a mock trial of global financial institutions for crimes against the nations of Africa. The audacious premise promises a stirring catharsis, but Mr. Sissako is a realist in other respects: The heart of his protest throbs with the sort of ache that won’t go away anytime soon.

Africa’s complex legacy demands a lot of any attempt at representation, and Mr. Sissako delivers a hybrid approach. Instead of staging a courtroom drama, he plants the proceedings in the midst of villagers going about their business in Bamako. A desultory pace and a floating perspective, as well as the lack of an explanation for the trial’s existence, keep the film from traveling along a recognizable path or building to pat crescendos. And rather than hewing to a single hero, such as a long-suffering farmer or a hotshot lawyer, “Bamako” evokes the voice of a community.

In a typical sequence, a villager stands up in front of the robed judges and an audience of countrymen on folding chairs to give testimony about the cynicism of foreign creditors. Then an interlude or two follows organically. These feature clothes dyers at work, or a couple (she goes off nightly to sing, he is jobless) enduring rocky times, or the sole lawyer representing the West, using his cell phone next to a goat.

Juxtaposition is the movie’s signature move, and the coupling of global and local is more eloquent, enduring, and touching than the speeches. More than one day of the “trial” begins with the singer wife (Aïssa Maïga), on her way out, stopping in front of the court for a guard to lace up her dress. This domestic moment, at once intimate and mundane, sets regular lives alongside the tectonic economic shifts engineered by institutions such as the World Bank that are condemned in the ongoing speeches.

This scene also taps a deeper sentiment than might first appear as it aims for more than simply cutting the world, and the West, down to size. Making the act a public one captures how Africa is everyone’s business, whether or not Westerners or Africans want it that way. In its delicacy, the lacing up of this dress is as persuasive as any of the arguments offered at length in the court debates that surround it.

That court testimony, delivered by lawyers and villagers, offers familiar charges painting international interventions in a cynical light. The Sisyphean experience of massive debt and privatization comes under heavy fire, and the postcolonial world emerges as a clash of systems that have produced shamefully foreseeable devastation. These attacks are not all airtight polemically (and one man simply belts out a song), but the trial’s idiosyncrasies open up a space for discussion and dissent in a world where the body of law has been given no quarter.

Of the village characters hovering through the film, Ms. Maïga’s singer and a cameraman who comes to film a wedding (which wends through the court) leave the greatest impression. Her singing opens and closes “Bamako” with a beguiling, looping melody. He proves to be a refreshingly clear-sighted figure (a proxy for the filmmaker?), chuckling at the roundabout employment plans of the singer’s husband. Their stories and those of others at the periphery are left elliptical at times but do not feel lacking.

Toward the end, “Bamako” risks bloating into platitude with a 30-minute run of trial speeches, but Mr. Sissako recovers with a couple of moves that deepen the sense of African autobiography. He also throws in, by means of a nearby TV set, a quickie parody of American westerns (starring executive producer Danny Glover) that’s a cheeky look at so-called “cowboy diplomacy.” Balancing the film’s rhetoric is a keen eye for light and composition throughout: the gorgeous opening during an azure predawn feels enchanted and exhausted by the possibilities of the days to come.

One intriguing aspect of the movie cannot be gleaned onscreen (unless perhaps you’re related to the filmmaker), but is a telling postscript. The courtyard is, in fact, in Mr. Sissako’s old family compound, located in Bamako, the capital of Mali. The movie therefore takes place not on a set but literally at home. It’s a gesture worth remembering amid the polemics, showing that the drive to speak out comes from the heart, and that the global is indeed personal.

Through February 27 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8112).