French ethnographer Jean Rouch spent four months on a pirogue filming Sorko fishermen on the Niger River attempting a traditional hippopotamus hunt that ultimately fails, a production later credited as a founding moment of participatory ethnographic cinema.
Fun fact: When Rouch screened the finished film back in the fishing village of Ayorou in 1954, the Sorko objected that the added music was inauthentic, since a real hunt requires silence, so Rouch stripped the soundtrack and revised the film in response.