NYWIFT Blog

By Sofiya Saykovska

Welcome to NYWIFT, Safiya Songhai!

Safiya’s cinematic journey is a blend of inspiration, resilience, and the drive to bring authentic stories to the screen. Raised by a pioneering mother in the television industry, Safiya’s work as a director is deeply influenced by her upbringing and her commitment to telling stories that highlight love, unity, and the power of Black families.

As a television anchor, award-winning director, and university professor, she brings a wealth of experience and passion to both her creative endeavors and her mentorship of aspiring filmmakers. NYWIFT was proud to show her documentary Interception: Jayne Kennedy • American Sportscaster at our 2024 Hamptons International Film Festival shorts showcase – and we are even happier to have her join us as a member!

In this interview, Safiya shares the themes that shape her storytelling, the challenges she’s overcome, and how she empowers the next generation of filmmakers to tell impactful stories.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

What brought you to NYWIFT?

New York Women in Film & Television is the most supportive entity for women who are audacious enough to storm the castle of the boys club that has dominated the film industry for more than a century. All resources that you will ever need from financing, to film preservation, to distribution and marketing are all covered in their weekly events and workshops.

I knew that NYWIFT was the missing piece of the puzzle for me after I graduated from NYU Film Grad School. The long term support that I would need in my career as a fiction film and documentary film director would best be served by becoming a member of NYWIFT.

Growing up with a mother who was a pioneering camera person, how did that influence your own journey into film and television?

Yes, my mother spent about 20 years as a television camera person, editor, producer and on-air talent. She graduated from Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film program and immediately began at WGN in Chicago, before moving back to our hometown of Philadelphia and assuming the role as a camera woman at WPVI-TV and later WKYW-TV. At the time, television programs were shot on film and my mom managed a large Arriflex camera and spliced film strips together to edit programming.

She founded a minority affairs television talk show entitled Visions which premiered on WPVI-TV and is still in existence to this day. At the time, she and her then husband produced the show entirely on their own. My mother booked the guests, shot the show, edited the show and hosted the show. In addition, she worked for the news program at WPVI. Later, my mom shot and edited the into to WPVI’s newscast and this intro opened the evening news for 15 years.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

My mother worked at WCCO in Minneapolis, WKYW in Philadelphia, WBZ in Boston and later for Frontline at WGBH-TV in Boston. There she won an Emmy award for a multi-part documentary about the Hoosac Tunnel and the lives lost during the construction of the ambitious project.

I watched her make television everyday of my life since I was a toddler and I knew I was capable of the same results. When I would get off from school, I went to the TV station to watch her edit the evening news. She was the lead editor at WKYW and WGBH. They relied on her for the top story of the night.

Primarily, her career gave me an unwavering confidence in my ability and impact.

We have a number of people in our family that work in the entertainment, broadcasting, film, theater, and creative arts industries. I knew I was going to work in television, and film production in all of the capacities.

Can you share your experience of transitioning from a law background to becoming a film director? What challenges did you face?

I didn’t really transition from a law career to a film career. Throughout college, I was a film major and history minor but I pursued law school because I thought I needed a safer career and I thought I could change society through moving juries and judges. However, after my second day of law school, I knew I didn’t want to spend my life in that field. I applied to NYU’s graduate film program, while I was trying to figure out how to break it to the Dean of Howard University Law School that I needed to abandon my full law school scholarship and pursue a career as a film director and TV personality.

The main challenges I faced in abandoning my legal career would be career uncertainty. There are very few clear paths to building a film director career, especially as a Black woman. It is much more clear how to be a Black woman attorney. However, I appreciate what I’ve learned in training for a legal career, and I’ve had to challenge people in court before, and I understand how to do legal research and to craft legal writing.

Law school however was draining me of my creative mind and personality. It felt like law school sucked all of the color out of life. I cared too much about the people in the court cases, and how their emotions were impacted by the wrong against them. I knew that if I wanted to change anything in society, I needed to change people’s emotions, and not the laws of the land.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

What themes or messages do you strive to convey through your work as a director?

Specifically, I want to illustrate stories of Black men and women being able to protect one another as a demonstration of love, unity and devotion. I want to show Black men protecting Black women, because this paradigm has been under attack since African-Americans were subjected to the horrors of the slave trade. We were sold on auction blocks, and tortured in front of each other. All in an effort to break us. The effort worked…very well. I see myself as a person who was sent to this earth to restore a sense of love in the Black family through allegory, metaphor and visual arts.

All of my fiction film projects are love stories that engage genres ranging from sci-fi, psychological thrillers, super natural, action films and family dramas. I explore all brands of love from romantic, to familial, to friendship, to the love of humanity. I want to demonstrate what empathy and heroism looks like.

How has your experience as a television anchor and reporter influenced your storytelling style in film?

Since I was about 20 years old, I’ve worked as a television talk show host, news reporter, and anchor woman. I’ve worked at five stations and I’ve won a a student Emmy and I’ve been nominated for a local Emmy. The career that I’ve had forced me to become brave when confronting tragedies like murder, child kidnappings, car accidents, fires and genocide. When you are a news reporter, you are in the middle of someone’s living nightmare and you have to climb into it with them and climb back out to bring their stories to the masses. You are tasked with making perfect strangers care about each other.

I felt very fulfilled in my career as a TV anchor/reporter. I was told by numerous people that my story was the best news package of all the stations that covered the event. But inversely, I could never achieve a meaningful balance in my personal life, or maintain a healthy diet and consistent fitness routine.

TV News has a high burn out rate and consumes your entire life. In the end, I didn’t find this career sustainable but it was very rewarding. I am going to bring my skill set back to fiction film and impact audiences emotions through fiction and narrative non-fiction projects.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

As a university professor, how do you approach teaching the next generation of filmmakers? What do you think is most important for them to learn?

The core thing I teach my students is to make films properly. Regardless of the ‘upgrades’ to equipment, software and technology, you still have to move people’s emotions. One must show, not tell, the story. One must learn the language of film which includes writing, casting, lighting, editing, tracking, depth of field, film score, color correction, opening title sequence, and the list goes on and on and on. One has to read literature, religious texts, history books, science books, autobiographies, plays, books of photography and attend art galleries so that you can become adept at telling stories.

Most importantly, a great writer and director will understand what all of the main characters are missing emotionally, so that the character will fight with everything they have to reach their goal. You must write characters that are experiencing an acute deficiency, otherwise, the stakes are not high enough and the story will flatline. Ticking clocks. Vicious unrelenting antagonists. High Stakes. I teach my students that first focus on story, and then performance.

There must be a formidable adversary for the protagonist in order for the story to be rich and rewarding for the audience.

Simply – don’t engage in stereotypes. Give each of your characters a belly button, a desperate fear, and hypocritical philosophy. Make a character that is their own worst enemy and resigned to their dire fate, until one day they are actually drowning and they will do everything to fight for their very. next. breath. Stereotypes are for dish detergent commercials and video vixens in music videos. Films require a greater level of writing and understanding of pain, want, desire, and desperation.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

What has been the most fulfilling project you’ve worked on so far, and what made it special for you?

Although I’m currently promoting a film entitled, Interception: Jayne Kennedy • American Sportscaster, about the trials of the first Black woman sportscaster in American Television, the most fulfilling project I’ve worked on would be a film I made entitled In Silent Spaces.

I made In Silent Spaces for people who were writhing in pain and who feel lost after the death of their mother. I wanted to restore the hearts of all those who have experienced this devastation and show them the overlap of reality and the afterlife.

The reason that this film is my most fulfilling is for several reasons. First, the film looks just like it did in my head when I imagined it. I followed my story-board and created the original sound track for the film. I did everything right on this film. I hired a great cast and crew to achieve this mission. It was the first and only film I’ve made, where I only had to focus on directing. I delegated all other positions to brilliant artists who managed their positions.

Promotion shot of Filmmaker Safiya Songhai on 129th street in Harlem New York for the best Documentary 2023 film Jayne Kennedy American Sportscaster. Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

The second reason I love this movie is that I showed it to Oscar winning-director Spike Lee and after viewing it he exclaimed ‘Now that’s a movie!’ When he said this I could have floated above the skyscrapers of New York and swan dived into the Atlantic. I had moved Spike Lee’s emotions, a man who had lost his own mother at a young age. He saw his story in the film I made. I knew at the moment he said this, that I had to fight to put my films before the masses. I could help people feel better about their pain.

The film was also for my own mother when I watched her grieve the loss of my grand mother. I wanted to show my mom that she was always going to be someone’s daughter even if their spirit had to depart from the earthy body.

When I watch In Silent Spaces, I’m always impressed that I made this film.

Photo courtesy of Safiya Songhai.

How do you maintain a balance between your various roles as a director, professor, and television anchor?

Now, I am only a filmmaker and a professor. I’ve retired my career as a TV presenter. Going forward, I will only do cameos in fiction films as the news presenter. Filmmaking is so all consuming

I’m currently a tenure track professor at University of Nevada, Reno, and I have developed the fiction film program at this school and helped students secure national recognition. Some of my students have been nominated for student Oscars, others have won Emmys, others have shot NYU Thesis films, and won major awards. We have a graduate program where students can produce fiction films while pursuing an MA in Journalism and Media Innovation. Being a college professor is the best companion career for a film director, especially a woman film director. As a woman film director and professor you can be there for your family, friends…maintain your health…travel internationally…and make epic work.

Connect with Safiya Songhai on Instagram at @SafiyaSonghai and on Facebook, and learn more about her work on Wikipedia and via her website www.safiyasonghai.com.