The film opens with an excerpt from Moi, un noir (1958): Oumarou Ganda telling Petit-Jules (and perhaps creating it in front of our eyes) about the Indochina War: “All of this is nothing, Petit Jules, all of this is nothing…” A February morning in 1997, on the terrace of Café Bullier in Montparnasse, Jean Rouch dunks his third croissant in a large cup of coffee. He soliloquizes: “I learned an extraordinary life rule from the Dogon, which has finally become my life rule: to live as if what is told were true… By living ‘as if’ I think that one gets much closer to reality. What do you think, my friend?” Nine months later, along the edges of the Niger River, the country of his debut, of his “first ethnographic concern”, Jean Rouch pretends to be shooting the twelve close ups of La vache merveilleuse with his friends Damouré Zika, Tallou Mouzourane, the ghost of Lam Ibrahim Dia, no longer with us today, and that he had made up the story. We had better hurry up: the evening roosters are crowing.