Bring Your Name: the Sean Bell All-Stars

Hold tight, we're cramming four huge updates into a single post. We made a film! It premiered at one of the top film festivals in the country! SLAM published a story about it! Here's the trailer!

We told a personal story about the origins of the film over on Instagram, but that doesn't even give the full context because Sean Bell's story is foundational for Unarmed. The Sean Bell jersey was the second one in the series – designed a full 8 years after his gruesome murder at the hands of three off-duty NYPD officers. Most of the other jerseys in the series were designed in response to terrible events happening in the news. The Sean Bell jersey was created upon reflection. It's because of the 50 shots fired at him that we developed the idea that stars on the jersey would represent bullets.

The film, however, is not directly about Sean Bell but about a basketball team named in his honor. Raheem "Rah" Wiggins renamed his team from DDN to the Sean Bell All-Stars after his friend and "little brother" from the neighborhood was gunned down. DDN was already a dominant team. The team continues to dominate some 18 years later, even as it is now known colloquially as "Sean Bell."

Our friend and collaborator Jon Lopez introduced us to Rah. This project is as much about Jon's images as it is about our time-based version of the story. We look forward to an opportunity to present the prints and film together as one event.

Sean Bell was a standout baseball player who made the Daily News' All-City Team. We were grateful to speak with his mother, Mrs. Valerie Bell, a number of times during the course of post-production, as well as his high-school baseball coach, Glenn Breyer. This post details some special photos that appear briefly in the film alongside Sean's pitching stats.

Oh yeah, and the film premiered at BlackStar. And Ben Osborne wrote a piece on it in SLAM. And if that's not enough, or if you want to see the poster, we built a whole separate website just for the film.