The key events in Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride, filmmaker Pamela Gordon’s docu-study of the most closely followed, most filmed pride of wild lions in film history, took place in 2015. The story, though, goes back nearly 30 years, and in many ways continues to resonate to this day.
As nature films go, Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is more of a film exposé than family entertainment — more 60 Minutes than The Wonderful World of Disney. It’s warm and quite beautiful in parts, but also gritty and unblinking in its pursuit of the truth.
Nature programs often tell us a comforting lie, that wildlife, left to its own devices, is doing just fine. The truth, of course, is quite different, and what is happening away from the camera, behind the scenes, bares scant resemblance to the pictures of idyllic family scenes featuring playful cubs straight out of The Lion King.
That truth, today more than ever, comes down to human-wildlife conflict in some of the most pristine, untrammeled wilderness areas remaining on the planet.
At the heart of Marsh Pride is the conflict between wild lions and the Maasai cattle herders who live alongside them, and in some cases among them, in a time of ever-expanding human settlements and rapidly advancing climate change.
The two don’t mix easily, if at all, and so, when Marsh Pride opens with the mass poisoning of lions some viewers have been following since BBC’s Big Cat Diary in 1996, no one who follows the environmental scene as it is today can be surprised at how this story ended. It’s all part of a seemingly never-ending cycle: Lions, becoming hungry in their natural home, kill cattle, the lifeblood of Maasai communities, and so the Maasai kill lions, out of revenge and to prevent losing more cattle in future.
The story from the lions’ point of view is dire, though. In just 20 years, more than half Africa’s population of wild lions has been wiped out. Just 20,000 remain. There are fewer wild lions today than there are rhinos. Elephants, also endangered, number some 400,000, 20 times as many. Clearly, lions are in trouble.
Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is no dirge, otherwise most people wouldn’t find a reason to watch. The program shows the Marsh pride during their halcyon years when individual lions with anthropomorphic, too-cute-by-half names like Scruffy, Tatu, Sienna, White Eye and Bibi became staples in British homes tuned to BBC’s weekly Big Cat Diary, a real-time nature program as cinema verité. These scenes go a long way toward explaining why lions matter.
The marsh pride itself is named for an unlikely oasis of swampland and year-round water at the southern edge of the often dry reserve, where the Mara borders Tanzania and the much larger Serengeti National Park to the south. Life, when things are going well, is near bliss, for lions and filmmakers alike. Marsh Pride borrows heavily from Big Cat Diary for these scenes of familial bliss — 26 years later, many viewers will be seeing this footage for the first time, even those living in the UK — but as we know, the world is changing and it is hard to know how, or even if, wild lions will remain, when confronted with an ever-expanding human population and the growing climate crisis.
“We’re at a point in the world where we need to decide if our future includes lions,” filmmaker Gordon said in a recent press interview. “I want a world with big cats in it. Poisoning them not only affects the lions but all the animals around them. I’m hoping viewers will see the importance and move in the direction of change.”
We’ll see.
Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride premieres Wednesday, Sept. 14, on PBS at 9E/8C and on the PBS app.