Faith Musembi, the Kenyan producer-director behind National Geographic's Lion, is determined to make natural history and wildlife filmmaking a more inclusive industry – both on screen and behind the camera.

For Musembi – the first Black Kenyan woman to produce-direct an episode of a major natural history series – the opportunity to work on Lion came off the back of her work on Queens, another National Geographic production filmed in Kenya.

When the BBC’s Natural History unit began looking for talent to work on Lion, National Geographic recommended Musembi – and so the work began.

"It felt kind of like a natural transition to work on Lion," Musembi told Radio Times. "They said, ‘We know this fantastic producer based in Kenya. Work with her.’ The BBC team met with me, and we hit it off."

Lion is a brand new four-part series telling the story of Kio, a young cub on a dramatic journey to become king.

The series was an impressive feat, with the crew having logged nearly 1,400 filming days across 52 shoots – the most time ever spent in the field exclusively filming one group of lions.

Coming on board as a producer-director isn’t as straight forward as it may seem when it comes to wildlife documentaries, with Musembi's title covering everything from planning shoots to shaping the story in the edit.

"The producing is being in the office, figuring out who’s going to do what shoots, and then again at the end, sitting in the edit and crafting this whole thing to come to life," she said.

In Maasai Mara – where Lion was filmed – each day was unpredictable. The team had to understand the lions, anticipate their behaviour and maintain continuity across multiple crews and filming locations. And it's not as simple as showing up and filming any lion.

"We’re not just filming any random lion," Musembi explained. "What’s happening in the story? What’s just happened? What do we need to follow up on? That’s what directing looks like."

Musembi worked closely on episode 2 in the series – A Band of Brothers – in which Kio attempts to win the acceptance of his older brothers.

For male lions, forming a coalition can be essential to survival. Together, they have a better chance of defending territory and establishing themselves. But Kio was born out of sync, and was a year younger and significantly smaller than his siblings.

"One of the ways that lions bond is they’ll play together, which is really rough," she said. "Kio, being a whole year younger than them, he’s way smaller. He can’t hang tough, and he has to be able to hang tough to be able to win them over."

Working on Queens and then Lion marked a significant milestone in Musembi’s career, something she sees as quite the turning point.

"There’s just something to be said for seeing something and aspiring to it,” she said. “Black women, just Africans directing or producing in major premium natural history series, just has never happened."

Without a clear role model in her field of work, Musembi knew she had to work out for herself how to occupy a space where people who looked like her had rarely been visible.

"I never knew that’s a thing I could aspire to," she told . "I’ve just been over here like a worker bee, doing my thing, doing it well. And then this became a possibility."

The achievement, however, is not something she views as an endpoint. She wants to ensure the next generation of African filmmakers can enter the industry more easily.

"I had to figure out: how do I make sure that there are others like me who look like me, who feel underrepresented like I did?” she said. “How can I make sure that they can come up and be able to do this a lot easier than I was able to do it?"

That commitment to widening access also informed Queens, which was intentionally female-led both in front of and behind the camera.

Musembi noted that increasing the number of women in natural history productions is not about excluding men, but rather about correcting an imbalance and introducing different perspectives.

"There can be a misunderstanding when people think that when we propose initiatives like this, we’re saying we don’t want men to work on these things. We’re just saying we don’t have enough women."

But it’s not just women-led initiatives like Queens that can see a production thrive, as she notes that natural history programmes can "benefit from having a different way of thinking", not just with women but with people from nations where the series are filmed.

She said: "We need more of that because cultures are different and the way people think about and approach stuff is different. And when you throw that in the mix of what’s already happening, I think it just makes it better."

Musembi’s next project is a film school – The Nuru Film Institute – a Maasai Mara based wildlife and documentary training hub designed to support aspiring filmmakers in Kenya and across Africa.

"I’m just doing my best to nurture this community that’s growing around this," she said. "It’s a whole ecosystem, and it thrives if there’s so many of us in it together, actively working towards doing things differently, as opposed to me just being a solo soldier trying to change everything by myself.

"I can’t do that – but I can do it with a whole community of people around me."

One of the biggest barriers is access to professional equipment. Natural history filmmaking often requires highly specialised cameras and lenses that are inaccessible to some – a "gap" she plans to address.

She added: "To step up to the premium level, you need to be playing with the tools, or working with the tools, that the people at the premium level work with."

But training and equipment are only part of the challenge. Musembi also wants to help develop a sustainable natural history industry within Kenya, so filmmakers are not dependent solely on broadcasters and production companies from the UK or US.

"When people have had access to the premium equipment and kit, what do you do with what you’ve made?" she asked. "We need to start thinking about how we grow this industry and economy here in Kenya."

Lion airs on Thursday 20 August at 9am on National Geographic. All episodes are available to watch on Disney+ now.

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