[1][2] He cast black African and white French students to improvise interactions with each other at an integrated high school in Abidjan.

The film is both ethnofiction and a documentary account of making ethnofiction:[6] counterposed to the main plot of the relation between the two racial groups is a subplot, which is the effect on the student actors of the making of the film itself.

[4] La Pyramide humaine was made on 16 mm Eastmancolor film in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

[4] Richard I. Suchenski notes that by ending the film with the suicide of one of the students, "Rouch forces the viewers to re-evaluate what they have just seen, drawing attention both to the inevitable presence of fictional tendencies within even the most uncontrolled filmmaking situation".

[9] François Truffaut places La Pyramide humaine among a group of films that "correspond to the new novel and those that aspire to be sociological documents or testimonies".