Most recent non-fiction films hammer at their own point of view, and, despite Ross Douglas’ evenhanded narrator’s voice and the not precisely equal time for all concerned, Aristide and the Endless Revolution leans heavily towards its point.

Swiss but filmically schooled in New York, director-producer Nicolas Rossier sides with Haiti’s twice-deposed and –expelled president, and against those global Machiavellian interests -- not only the US and former mother country France -- that on the altar of money would sacrifice democracy, reform and egalitarianism in the hemisphere’s second republic (1804). Juxtaposing interviews with the slight, soft-spoken priest-become-president now in exile in Pretoria, along with repeated comments from supporters, opponents, experts, laymen and critics both on the island and off, interspersed with ample though short clips of violence and death in that country, the film weaves the same sorry tale common to Third World ex-colonies.

Two hundred years after the Maroons’ Bois-Caïman insurrection, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide received two of every three votes in Haiti’s first free election. Deposed with CIA support the following year, 1991, he was brought back to an additional five-year term by the “voice of the voiceless,” only to be muscled out in another coup, February 2004. The land fallen into a chaos of poverty, seventy percent unemployment, nearly non-existent education and health care, endemic violence and rebel armies, he called on the international community and instead found himself aboard a U.S. military plane bound for the then-undisclosed Central African Republic, with which America had no diplomatic relations.

Interviewed several times, U.S Assistant Secretary of State Noriega insists that amidst corruption and ineptitude the president had resigned willingly, a version seconded by Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Washington’s Ambassador Foley and amened by President Bush’s proclamation of a “hopeful new chapter [in which] we are prepared to help.” Aristide insists he was kidnapped, bullied out for, among other things, tripling Disney and Wal-Mart sweatshop wages to a dollar-a-day, trying to harness foreign economic control and rein in the power of the homegrown French Creole élite.

From C-SPAN, U.S. Senate hearings on the island republic are included; editors and authors, ministers, lawyers, politicians and lobbyists follow one another on-screen, and it grows difficult to keep precise issues straight. Charges, counter-charges and rebuttals fly, which eighty-two minutes cannot clarify or order. There are assertions about foreign money and arms behind thugs from the Dominican Republic to the east, hanky-panky involving eight contested senate seats, unrealistic or unfulfilled campaign promises, Franco-Canadian-American embargoes. This poorest nation in the Hemisphere, and most densely inhabited, is undeniably at the mercy of the rich entitled, both its own and other countries’, but along the way the picture becomes jumbled and indistinguishable from too many others: Bolivia, for example, whose comparable national life span has witnessed a half-dozen times as many coups and whose indigenes are as miserably downtrodden as Haiti’s imported blacks.

A viewer’s take on the issues here will depend on his or her  sociopolitical baggage, for in this back-and-forthing among conflicting viewpoints, the center is lost in the trees of the forest. High-profile Papa and Baby Doc and their Tontons-macoutes are introduced for but a few distracting seconds, then dropped; ditto the charismatic betrayed liberator Toussaint-Louverture and, a century later, the first (1914-35) of four U.S. occupation-“interventions.”

Most ill-advised of all, only late and briefly and unconnectedly does the film broach two key economic factors: eight-hundred-fifty-million dollars advanced to island NGOs but not to the elected government; and the ninety-million francs extorted by Paris for recognition of Haitian independence and as compensation for the loss of its most lucrative (sugar) possession. The latter the equivalent of twenty-one-billion current U.S. dollars, France dismisses Port-au-Prince’s requests for reimbursement by comparing that to Spanish reparations for conquistador crimes. (Aristide’s counsel further alleges theft of legal documents.)

Some old engravings notwithstanding, Aristide is about the present, not history, but wearing its heart on its sleeve, it spreads itself thin and lacks desired focus. Power is corrupt, big eat small, abuses of human rights proliferate -- but where, exactly, to lay the finger, stanch the bleeding, heal the wounds? Like its own fringed photography, the documentary cannot clearly align its multiple images, much less its issues. 

(Released by Baraka Productions; not rated by MPAA.)