“In Good Hands,” a film inspired by the memoir of Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, a Pitt assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine, is one of five films chosen to compete for the HBO Short Film Award.

The movies selected for this exhibition, held at the American Black Film Festival on June 11 in Miami Beach, Fla., compete for a $10,000 top prize and automatic qualification for the Academy Awards’ short film category.

Based on a screenplay by 2021 Pitt alumna Yasmine Crawley, “In Good Hands” tells the story of Diana Asante, a pediatric emergency physician navigating challenges brought on by her last patients of a shift: a white boy unfamiliar with a Black female doctor, and an African-American teenager caught in a dire situation with law enforcement. Asante is portrayed by Pittsburgh actress and musician Channel Jones-Harris.

The incidents were drawn from real-life events of Owusu-Ansah, who serves as EMS medical director in UPMC Children’s Hospital and recently consulted for HBO’s “The Pitt.”

A former CBS network page, Crawley works as an assistant and production associate at See it Now Studios in Hollywood, which produces documentaries and unscripted series for Paramount+ and CBS.

Crawley, film director Nick Bucheit and Jones-Harris shared recollections about making “In Good Hands” earlier this year at a screening in the Center for Creativity’s Understory workshop in the Cathedral of Learning lower level.

Crawley and Owusu-Ansah earlier participated in the PITTch Storytelling Initiative, funded in 2021 by a Richard King Mellon Foundation grant to create more local career opportunities in southwestern Pennsylvania's growing film industry. 

Carl Kurlander, a Pitt film professor and founder of C4C: The Pittsburgh Lens and the Pitt in LA program, noted that “In Good Hands” was made as a community teaching film with a “diverse group of students and community members working in front of and behind the camera.”

— Shannon O. Wells

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