One of the profitable streetball groups in New York Metropolis—yr after yr after yr—is the Sean Bell All-Stars, coached by Jamaica, Queens, native Raheem “Rah” Wiggins. A embellished new brief movie, Deliver Your Identify, reminds viewers of the story behind the staff’s identify.
Sean Bell was a former highschool baseball star from Queens celebrating his impending marriage in November, 2006, when he was shot by plain-clothes cops. He died that evening at age 23. Wiggins was a childhood buddy of Bell’s who had been impressed to change into a basketball coach by New York-area legends Jimmy Salmon and Tiny Morton. Wiggins was already coming into streetball tournaments below the staff identify DDN (Dat’s Dem N—s), however he renamed the squad in honor of his fallen buddy. And the staff—not a highschool AAU squad however a group of adults, typically with professional expertise like Lance Stephenson or Tyshawn Taylor—has been a powerhouse ever since.
“We’re the most effective staff within the metropolis,” Wiggins says within the movie, which takes you up shut and private to a sport at Brooklyn’s Gersh Park. “Folks ask after I’m gonna stroll away? So long as after I lose, folks make a giant deal out of it, I gotta come again.” He provides later, of the importance of the staff’s identify: “That’s my job, to maintain [Sean’s] identify to the general public ear.”
Deliver Your Identify is directed by Raafi Rivero, the filmmaker and artist behind the continuing Unarmed undertaking, which exists “in memoriam of Black victims of police violence.” Rivero additionally labored on an upcoming docuseries across the 2024 NBA postseason that can air on ESPN.
Deliver Your Identify will make its world premiere on the BlackStar Movie Competition in Philadelphia in August. From there, Rivero hopes to display screen it at playground basketball venues in New York Metropolis in addition to at different movie festivals. And what does Rivero need viewers to remove from the movie? “I hope they’re impressed,” he says, “by the on a regular basis heroism of individuals like Rah Wiggins.”
Portraits by Jon Lopez.
