heard WBBM-TV, a CBS Chicago station, needed interns.
“I thought, ‘TV, what’s this? That’s not me,’” Somani says. “But they hired me and placed me with a general assignment reporter and the political unit.” Somani found her niche in broadcast journalism as she helped cover Jim Edgar’s run for governor and Paul Simon’s run for the U.S. Senate in 1990. She earned a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and returned to Springfield to work as the morning show producer at WICS/News Channel 20.
Over the next 10 years, Somani produced the evening news in South Bend, Ind., and Norfolk, Va. She worked as a show and field producer for WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., where she contributed to an award-winning series that profiled the city’s working women. She wrote and produced financial broadcasts for CNBC and produced “Early Today” for NBC in New York. In 2002, Somani had just finished filming a documentary on the Indian Diaspora when her mother called to tell her that her father was in the hospital, suffering from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. She returned home; he died nine days later.
“I was in so much shock,” Somani says. “I felt like I needed a change. I was trying to figure out what was the next move.” Somani spent the next six months traveling back and forth from New York to Springfield to be with her mom. She then moved to Washington, D.C., and was hired as an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at American University’s School of Communication for the 2003-2004 year. “I was in the right place at the right time,” Somani says. “I came in with all of this TV experience, and I discovered that I really liked teaching.”
“Mom thinks Dad’s soul guided me to academia, since he was an academic,” she adds. She earned her Ph.D. from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in 2008. As she researched and taught classes, she also started work on Crossing Lines with Leena Jayaswal.
The pair, both Indian women in their 30s, met at American University. Somani brought experience in picking sound-bites and writing scripts, while Jayaswal came from a background in documentaries.
They bought a camera and in 2004 traveled to India, where Somani visited and filmed her father’s very traditional family. She worried about going to them as a single woman in her 30s, not fluent in the Hindi language, but she overcame those obstacles.
She forged a new connection to the country through her relatives. “I gave something back for once,” Somani says in the film. “They had a chance to see my father through me.” Somani and Jayaswal finished the 30minute documentary in 2007, and by 2008, it was distributed to public television stations by the National Educational Telecommunications Association and accepted into film festivals worldwide. The documentary has won several awards, including the Gracie Allen Award for “Outstanding Documentary — Short Format” from American Women in Radio and Television and the Best Documentary Award from the California Arts Association Digital Short Film Festival.
Somani and Jayaswal will continue to promote the documentary in screenings at the Heart of England International Film Festival in June, the University Film and Video Association Conference in New Orleans in August and the International Film Festival South Africa in November.
“We started out thinking it was only going to screen in South Asian film festivals,” Somani says. “We thought it was going to be a story about me and my dad. It’s a story about second-generation ethnic-Americans and their cultural identity.”
For more information on the film, visit www.crossinglinesthefilm.com.
Contact Amanda Robert at [email protected].
