Rewriting the history of colonialism from the point of view of the colonized, Cameroonian filmmaker Kobhio provides a fascinating revisionist perspective on Albert Schweitzer, secular saint of the colonial era. Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné is not, however, a facile exercise in iconoclasm but rather a deeply felt lament for a missed opportunity for a cross-cultural encounter between Africa and Europe. Filming on the site of Schweitzer's hospital in Gabon, Kobhio elicits psychologically complex portrayals from his actors. Behind Schweitzer's impenetrable reserve, he discovers a man blinded to the people and the country around him by his own spiritual self-absorption and arrogance. For Schweitzer to play the role of the stern but loving father, he had to cast Africans as childlike primitives whom he could protect from the temptations of modernity. The film reveals that the ultimate tragedy of colonialism may have been its refusal to see and value the colonized as autonomous, creative human beings.