Layers of mimicry abound in this marvelous story about Albert Van Haelst-a Flemish missionary who spread not only the Word but also the Moving Image throughout the Belgian Congo after the Second World War-and his two principal actors, “le gros” Matamata and “le maigre” Pilipili. The film transports us back to Van Haelst's “cinematographic apostolate” in Kasai in the 1950s, where Matamata and Pilipili go through their Laurel and Hardy-esque pantomime routines, infused as they were with implicit colonial and Christian import for the local population. In Kinshasa and Belgium in the 1990s, Zaireans and retired Flemish fathers reflect back on what the films meant to them then, as well as on what they might mean in the post-colonial present. Mercifully resistant to the over-simplification of cultural politics that is de rigeur in intellectual circles in the U.S. today, Matamata and Pilipili is an ambiguous and ambivalent exemplification not only of film's capacity to transcend the ideological inclinations of its makers, and of its susceptibility to a multiplicity of interpretations, but also of film's unique transcultural appeal.