How Lionesses Became the Emotional Core of National Geographic’s ‘LION’: A Conversation with Filmmaker Faith Musembi

Faith Musembi. (National Geographic/Rachael Kinley)

National Geographic for Disney/Rachael Kinley

National Geographic’s newest four-part documentary follows one lion cub’s journey to becoming king, yet beneath Kio’s rise lies a deeper narrative about the women who make survival, leadership, and legacy possible.

For generations, stories about lions have centered on the male of the species. The imagery is familiar: the magnificent mane, the commanding roar, the territorial battles, and the powerful male positioned at the heart of the pride. Even within The Lion King universe, the narrative has largely focused on the male lion’s journey and his eventual ascent to leadership.

National Geographic’s new four-part documentary LION offers a strikingly different perspective. From The Lion King director Jon Favreau and BBC Studios executive producer Mike Gunton, the series follows Kio, a lion cub filmed over four years as he grows from a vulnerable young cub into a powerful leader. Along the way, he faces loss, exile, fierce rivals, and the challenges of finding his place within the pride.

While Kio’s journey anchors the series, one of the most compelling stories unfolding around him belongs to the lionesses. As the centerpiece and grounding force of the series, the lionesses hunt, nurture, protect, make difficult decisions, and work collectively. In many ways, they create the conditions that allow the next generation to survive.

That perspective immediately caught my attention, and it feels particularly resonant amid ongoing conversations about invisible labor, community leadership, and generational caregiving among women, particularly Black women.

To explore that connection, I spoke with Faith Musembi, a Kenyan producer and director and one of the filmmakers behind LION. Musembi’s work includes Queens, Incredible Animal Journeys, and Chasing the Rains. She is also the founder of the Nuru Film Institute, a Maasai Mara-based training hub dedicated to cultivating the next generation of African wildlife storytellers. I asked Musembi how she perceived the lionesses while filming on the ground and what she discovered about their influence that might surprise viewers.

“I know you’re not supposed to have favorites, but the lionesses were my favorite,” Musembi said. “It’s hard to be in the field and not fall in love with them.”

Although LION is ultimately Kio’s story, Musembi believes his mother, Summer, could have easily carried the entire four-part series herself.

“She is easily the most remarkable lioness we’ve ever filmed,” she said. Summer’s impact on the pride is enormous. According to Musembi, she is responsible for more than half of the lions viewers see throughout LION. Her influence is not measured simply by physical strength or dominance, but by the lives she helps sustain.

That becomes particularly apparent as Kio grows older. By the third episode, Kio and his brothers have begun to look like adults. Their manes are coming in, and from a distance, they appear capable of taking care of themselves. However, they are still young, and they still need their mother.

Summer recognizes what her son needs and makes a consequential decision. She leaves her group so Kio can be around older males and have a better chance of finding his place among them. She does not simply send him on his way; she hunts for them. Seven young male lions require food, and one lioness takes on the responsibility of providing it. “You look at the big boys, and you think they could look after themselves, but they couldn’t,” Musembi explained. “They needed mom to do it.”

For Musembi, that decision represents a different kind of strength, one that is not always immediately visible. “She needs to make this decision and leave her group, and it’s quite a—it’s a huge sacrifice,” she said. “And as women, we do that all the time. If you have children or people you’re looking after, you forget what you need because you want to look after everyone else.”

That observation is one of the most powerful ideas running through LION: the distinction between physical strength and emotional strength. Wildlife documentaries often give us a very specific image of power. Strength is visible. It is loud. It shows up in a fight or a display of dominance.

Summer’s strength looks different. “I think that takes an internal strength that a lot of women can connect to,” Musembi said. “That’s a strength to walk away from what you know.”

Summer chooses to leave behind what is familiar: her sisters, her daughters, and the pride she knows, to give her son a better chance at survival.

“We can’t say we know exactly what’s going on in Summer’s mind, but we see the decision she makes,” Musembi said. “To focus all your energy on your offspring and go, everything I’m going to do is going to be for this guy, and I’m going to walk away from my sisters, my daughters, and everyone else just to make sure that this little guy has a fighting chance at life.”

“That’s a strength that transcends the physicality of stuff,” she added.

When Women Move in Formation

Her previous work also informs Musembi’s perspective on the lionesses on QUEENS, another National Geographic and Disney+ series focused on female-led animal societies.

“That’s just something that gets my heart beating,” she said. “I’m focusing on the female story, the female gaze, and that’s something I brought with me on LION and with the lionesses in particular.” One of the things that struck her most about the lionesses was how they operate collectively.

“They do everything together,” Musembi said. “They’ll be chilling, sleeping, and then suddenly all of them will get up together.” Sometimes, that means preparing to hunt. Musembi compared the moment to Beyoncé’s “Formation.” “Every time it happens, I promise you, I hear Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ in my head,” she said. “Because it’s like they’ll stand up because they’ve seen a buffalo, and it’s like, okay, ladies, let’s now get in formation.”

The image is funny, but the meaning behind it is serious. The lionesses spread out, coordinate their movements, and become completely focused on the task in front of them.

For Musembi, that collective behavior also reminded her of the women who have supported her throughout her own life. “That just always makes me think of even the women in my life that hold me up,” she said. “I’ve been blessed to have women that are just really solid in my life to remind me what I’m about and what my goals are about.”

That connection became especially personal when she thought about her mother. Musembi grew up in Kenya in a family that did not have much financially. She remembers her mother walking her and her older sister to school, and when the roads became particularly muddy, carrying them. “She would carry us on her back,” Musembi recalled. “She would make my older sister wait and then take her on her back, cross a particularly muddy spot, and then go back, get my sister on her back.”

Watching the lionesses make sacrifices for their young brought those memories rushing back. “Working and seeing these female lionesses, these lionesses do what they do, I think about things like that,” she said. “Those are the connecting points.”

The connection is not simply about motherhood. It is about recognizing the women whose labor can become so routine to everyone around them that it disappears from view.

Rethinking What Strength Looks Like

That idea also challenged how we think about strength in the animal kingdom. When Musembi visited the Maasai Mara, one of the first things she noticed while observing lions was how much visible work seemed to fall to the females. The lionesses hunted, moved together, and cared for the pride, while the male lions commanded much of the visual attention. “A lot’s made of the big males,” she said. “And when you’re out in the field, you do ask that. Like, where are the big males?”

She explained that the lionesses are the ones who “run the show.” “They hunt. They do everything,” Musembi said.

That reality makes LION especially interesting because the series does not show strength only through obvious displays of physical dominance. The male lions’ lives are often defined by confrontation. They fight to claim territory and prides, and their physical strength is essential to their survival. The lionesses, however, demonstrate another form of power. “The male lions, they always have to display and fight,” Musembi said. “Their existence is based on fighting because they have to fight to claim territory, to claim pride. So everything is a fight.”

For the lionesses, strength can mean something quieter, like choosing to leave something behind that is familiar, and making a survival decision rooted in sacrifice with no fear.

That distinction feels especially meaningful when thinking about the generations of women who have carried families and communities forward through forms of labor that are not always recognized as leadership, because leadership does not always look like being at the center of the room.

Reclaiming the Wildlife Story

Musembi’s career reflects another kind of transformation: changing who gets to tell Africa’s wildlife stories. She initially envisioned herself becoming a Hollywood director. She spent time in Los Angeles and loved the city, but eventually realized that pursuing that path would require years of navigating the industry before she could produce or direct the projects she envisioned.

So she returned to Kenya.

What she calls a “happy accident” ultimately changed her career trajectory. At the time, an international wildlife production company was specifically looking for Kenyan filmmakers. Musembi had always loved wildlife and filmmaking, but she had never considered how naturally the two could intersect.

The job description mentioned that the successful candidate would be living in the wild. “That was all I had to see,” she said. “I was like, yep, sign me up. I need to be away from the city.”

That first opportunity became a turning point. “For the first time, it was a fulfillment unlike anything else I’d ever felt in my work,” she said. “I could pour myself out, and just the work I was doing, the fulfillment was pouring me back in. I wasn’t feeling burnt out. I was feeling alive.”

She realized she had found the work she was meant to do. Yet entering the wildlife filmmaking industry as a Kenyan filmmaker also exposed her to a larger problem.

“It’s really rare for an African to work on wildlife films,” Musembi explained. “It’s kind of crazy because all this wildlife is filmed in African countries, so you wonder, why don’t Africans work in these productions?”

The answer, she said, is largely rooted in the industry’s history, which began in the United Kingdom. That means many of the opportunities and professional networks remain concentrated there.

For Musembi, advancing her career eventually meant moving to England to access the broader ecosystem of wildlife filmmaking. Now she wants to make that journey easier for the filmmakers coming after her.

Following LION, Musembi is working toward establishing a wildlife film training school in Kenya. “I feel I’m in a unique position,” she said. “I know the people that are making this content. I know what’s needed. So now I’m just going to take all of that and package it into a training.”

Her goal is to create a pipeline of African talent capable of contributing to international productions while also creating stories from within their own communities.

“I think we create the best things if different minds are working on stuff,” she said. “So that’s my grand dream.”

Making the Land Part of the Story

That commitment to representation also shaped Musembi’s approach to filming LION in the Maasai Mara.

The filmmakers relied heavily on local guides and experts to track the lions, whose movements could never be predicted from one day to the next.

For Musembi, those relationships were not simply logistical. They became part of the storytelling.

Because she speaks local languages, she could connect with people who interact with the landscape and wildlife regularly, to hear their stories, observations, myths, and interpretations of animal behavior.

“I take that, and I weave it into some of the storytelling,” she said. She was also intentional about making sure the Indigenous Maasai community was represented in the series.

Musembi herself is from the Kamba tribe, while the Maasai Mara is home to the Maasai people. That distinction mattered to her. “I’m considered an outsider,” she explained. “So I also felt a personal responsibility to make sure that the Maasai feel represented because we’re in their land.”

She continued, “What I feel I bring is to make sure that the area in which I’m filming, the people from that land, the actual Indigenous people, feel truly represented in the storytelling.”

The Strength of Feeling

Perhaps the most unexpected lesson Musembi has taken from her years of wildlife filmmaking is that she does not want to lose her emotional connection to the work. “I’ve learned that I’m just never gonna be a documentarian that can just be unfeeling,” she said.

There was a time when she believed being a good filmmaker meant being able to detach from what was happening in front of her; she does not anymore. “I’ve always thought maybe I’ll get to that point where I can sit in the hard moments and be able just to power through and just do the thing,” she said. “But I’m not that. I mean, my heart’s on my sleeve.”

Sometimes that means crying while filming difficult scenes. “And I used to think that’s a weakness because you want to be hard,” she said.

Yet she has come to understand that empathy is not something she needs to overcome. “I’ve learned to embrace that part of me,” she said. “It is who I am. It’s not changing. And I’ve realized I don’t want it to change.”

That may ultimately be one of the most meaningful ideas LION offers. The series is ostensibly about a young male lion’s journey toward becoming king. Look more closely, however, and the story becomes something else entirely: a meditation on the people, and particularly the women, whose invisible work makes leadership possible.

LION is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

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