Back to selection
Women in the Wilderness: How Nat Geo’s Queens Aims to Close the Gender Gap in Natural History Filmmaking
Queens director of photography Sophie Darlington and director Faith Musembi film elephants (Photo: courtesy of National Geographic for Disney/Rachael Kinley) When National Geographic’s Janet Han Vissering and Wildstar Films’s Vanessa Berlowitz got the idea to make Queens, a six-part natural history series about female animals made by an all-woman production crew, they knew it would be a challenge. Only something like five percent of wildlife filmmakers are women, a number far short of the 20 to 30 percent average across the entertainment industry overall. They didn’t know how hard it would be, though.
“On the camera side, before Queens there were probably about five women who’d had the opportunity to get to the ‘premium wildlife’ level of work,” Berlowitz explains. “There may have been women who’d worked on live shows, or who’d gone into the field to shoot some animals for a few days for children’s shows or reality shows, but very few have done that kind of work for months on end.” They ran into the same issue on the production end, where Berlowitz says they found very few female producers or directors who’d carried the full weight of creating a large-scale nature program.
So, Berlowitz says, “We decided to recruit based on talent and transferable skills, plugging the gaps with men, particularly for some of the more technical shooting areas.” All the film’s producers were women, though, as were the researchers and most of the editors and field directors. The production also committed to diversifying its crew across race and origin, hiring two African women, producer-director Faith Musembi and camera assistant Erica Rugabandana.
“I really care about transferring skills back to the countries and people that live with the animals,” Berlowitz says. “Their voices need to be heard on an international level and at a local level, so that women like Erica can take the skills she learned on our show and put it back into films to make for her community if she chooses.”
There’s something missing in wildlife storytelling, Musembi says, when the production’s crew is from elsewhere. “If the BBC comes into a country in Africa and makes a series, they’re being funded by the British public, so their responsibility is to the British,” she explains. “There’s very little consideration paid to the locals in the areas, who really understand the challenges of being the guardians of those animals or the stakeholders of these wilderness areas. Beyond that, the consideration of those productions is almost always for the wildlife and leaves the communities out of the narrative—which you really can’t do, because you need the people on the ground involved and engaged in conservation, too. […] If you’re culturally sensitive, you’ll find that your stories are more impactful and beneficial, and actually address the solutions on the ground with empathy and with the realism we need to deal with conservation.”
“Wildlife shows made by filmmakers from the UK and US don’t do well in the Global South, because there’s sometimes a bit of a disconnect,” she continues. “They are made in a style that doesn’t appeal to the locals because we’re used to a different type of pacing and storytelling sensibility.” Local viewers find themselves unable to connect to American shows about animals because the storytelling style is faster, louder and more energetic.
Getting the assignment to shoot elephants in her native Kenya “smack in the middle of the pandemic” lit a fire under Musembi both culturally and artistically. “For my first shoot on Queens, we were filming out of Amboseli National Park, near my mom’s home town,” she says. “We were coming across all these different [elephant] family groups, and the researchers were telling us they hadn’t seen some of them in a long time. I remember looking at one of the matriarchs who was about 65 years old and thinking that my mom had probably seen her as a calf, because growing up, she would see elephants roaming about from a distance. I immediately felt this connection, which was important, because I was so anxiety ridden because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d been thrown in the deep end—with lots of support, mind you—but was still incredibly anxious about whether I could deliver. But because of the fact that I was home, where my mom had grown up, I felt okay. It became this great foundation for success.”
Having people like Musembi and Rugabandana on staff became a huge asset to the crew—not just because they were trying to shoot during COVID, when crossing borders and moving around the world was a challenge, but because they could relate to local researchers and villagers working with and around the animals. “Because Faith is Kenyan, she could speak Swahili to our elephant biologists, who were also women, and they had this immediate mutual bond,” Berlowitz says. “They opened up to her and gave her completely different access and different ideas that they might have otherwise. That really informed the story we told in a very new way.”
As a show, Queens focuses each episode not on a particular location or behavior, but on an individual animal’s storyline, whether it’s a pregnant lioness looking to establish herself on the savannah with her sisters or an aging elephant matriarch struggling to cope with the realities of a changing world. The unique framing is part of what helped sell Queens, its creators say, especially in a marketplace increasingly crowded with streamers, animal-centric programming and production crews.
“With something like Queens, you’ve got the opportunity to do full, dynamic storytelling,” says Chloe Sarosh, the show’s writer and co-executive producer. “The range of stories being told [in wildlife filmmaking] is broadening, which is really exciting, because it used to be sequence-based and now I think the lines are blurring between genres.” In the past, you would sell a series on, “the first time ever a behavior’s been filmed,” Berlowitz says. “I think there was over-reliance on that, because that was sometimes an excuse for not having really the best storytelling. It all became ‘the first time you’ve seen an X killing a Y.’ I think forcing people to kind of look at non-obvious animals, animals that have been overlooked, there’s just as amazing stories in there. That’s what we found by going scientists and saying, ‘Okay, we all know that to film lions, the male lions are all the showy, grabby stuff—the big hair, the big teeth, the fights.’ But actually, there’s subtleties within the lion story [that] have never really been focused on and they get really excited. Suddenly, there’s this stuff that’s equally compelling, where you’re seeing females using the power of their power to consent to a male in order to protect the rest of her cubs. One has been slaughtered by the male, but she then chooses to have sex with the male to protect the others.”
On Queens, Sarosh explains, she worked to develop narrative arcs over the course of episodes using the footage they’d gathered, rather than just dipping in for a peek at, say, the first time a hyena behavior was ever captured on film. Queens has that in spades—in the case of the hyenas, the captured an incident of infanticide meant to shake up the balance of power in the pack—but Sarosh used those behaviors in the context of what was happening in the animals’ lives overall, a move she hopes she sees more of across the industry, saying, “that’s how you get behind these amazing characters to really feel their pain and celebrate their triumphs.”
While Queens does use the occasional cool bit of camera technology—a tiny drone zipping through the jungle to find bonobos, for instance, or a night vision camera used to capture a fight between lions and hyenas—the show doesn’t rely on it. That’s not to say the show doesn’t use incredible equipment, like remote cameras or a specialized lens that the filmmakers say costs upwards of a quarter of a million dollars, but a lot of what made the show succeed and what brought its makers together was a sense of camaraderie and mentorship.
After every morning in the field filming elephants, Musembi says, she and director of photography Sophie Darlington—a natural history filmmaker since 1991—would go over rush footage during lunch, with the veteran using the break to explain her thought process and decision-making. “You don’t realize how much is going on when you’re filming and to be able to share that—it’s how I initially learned, actually,” says Darlington. “I met a BBC film crew when I was 19 and living in Tanzania. It took me three years, but I managed to get in with Hugo van Lawick, a filmmaker famous for his work with Jane Goodall. He took me on as a camp manager and, when I said I wanted to learn to film, spent seven years mentoring me in the Serengeti. Not that many people get that experience, and because I had an incredible mentor, there’s been no greater joy than being able to pay it forward now to people like Faith.”
“Sophie was able to give us tips about filming elephants like, ‘When it’s this time of day, the light is harsh and their skin is going to look terrible. Try this angle, because then you can actually use that light,’ and all these different things I would never have thought about,” Musembi says. “You might be thinking, ‘We’re just going to put the camera here and wait for the elephant to walk to us,’ but there are really all these different dimensions of filming this creature.’”
Working on Queens was a special challenge, Darlington says, not just because of the commitment to crafting narrative stories, but also because of the pressure the women felt to go above and beyond. “Queens is, without a doubt, the best series I’ve ever worked on and I’m really proud of that,” she explains. “It had to be brilliant, though, because there was a little bit of an element of ‘the girls are doing it.’ I think we had to really deliver, and we did.”
