Surrounded by lions?

There's an article in The New Yorker that says that when she was a child her parents' car broke down in Cameroon and got surrounded by lions, so her parents put her in a metal box to protect her. There's no mention of what happened to her parents, but presumably the lions killed them, as the article says: "It was said by some that she had survived for fifteen days under the hot African sun," which surely is nonsense. There's nothing else about this that I can find anywhere other than in The New Yorker article; did any of it happen? It sounds like a pretentious director mythologising herself. It also says "Only as an adult did Claire Denis realize that she hadn’t been afraid of the lions all those years ago. She suspects that she was too young to be frightened," which the author interprets as "a refusal of victimhood', so it's possible the entire article is meaningless and the writer was getting paid by the word. The alternative is to believe that a child was locked in a metal box for fifteen days under the hot African sun, surrounded by lions that had killed her parents, and not only did she not die, but she refused victimhood. I find that a struggle.