Moana (1926) is a documentary film, the first docufiction in the history of cinema, directed by Robert J. Flaherty, the creator of Nanook of the North (1922). Moana was filmed in Samoa in the villages of Safune on the island of Savai'i. The name of the lead male character, moana means 'ocean' in the Samoan language.
In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and children in Samoa for more than a year. Flaherty arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925.
Along with Flaherty, the Portuguese director José Leitão de Barros is one of the first filmmakers to explore docufiction and ethnofiction as forms of dramatic narrative: Maria do Mar (1930) is the second one.
Trying to get Flaherty to repeat the success of Nanook, Paramount Pictures sent Flaherty to Samoa to capture the traditional life of the Polynesians on film. Flaherty took both a regular movie camera and a Prizmacolor camera, hoping to film some footage in that color process, but the Prizmacolor camera malfunctioned. Moana is thought to be the first feature film made with panchromatic black-and-white film, rather than the orthochromatic film commonly used at the time in Hollywood feature films.
However, Flaherty was always one step behind Western influences. When Flaherty arrived in Safune, he found that the missionaries had been there before him, and the native population had already abandoned their traditional clothing for Western styles. Furthermore, the island was a virtual paradise so that unlike Nanook, he could not build on the theme of "Man against Nature" for the storyline of his film. The film showed the young male lead undergoing a traditional Samoan tattoo. Therefore, while the film was visually stunning, it failed at the box office, leaving Flaherty to attempt to find other locations more like the treacherous Arctic for his next film. In the book Call it Courage it was known as the God of the Sea.
The word "documentary" was first applied to films of this nature in a review of this movie written by "The Moviegoer", a pen name for John Grierson in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926.