Christian O’Neill, half brother of the late Nicky O’Neill and co-director of 41.

If it hadn’t been for a strange series of coincidences that followed the death of Nicholas O’Neill, the youngest person to die in the Station nightclub fire on Feb. 20, 2003, Christian de Rezendes says he probably wouldn’t have made 41, the feature-length film about O’Neill’s life and the strange things that happened after his death. The film will be screened at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Stadium Theater in Woonsocket.

Over the phone from his apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., where de Rezendes has lived for the past two years, he says the oddly titled 41 was originally intended to be no more than a short film detailing some of the high point’s of O’Neill’s tragically shortened life. It was shown as a 44-minute work-in-progress, accompanying de Rezendes’ feature-length film version of They Walk Among Us, a play about overcoming intolerance that was written by O’Neill. De Rezendes had videotaped a performance of the play which was shown at the Stadium at a Feb. 20, 2005, second anniversary remembrance of the Station tragedy.

When he began working on 41 in January 2005, de Rezendes had expected it to be basically a film about Nicky’s family and friends sharing their thoughts about him. But as he delved into details of O’Neill’s life de Rezendes, who had never met Nicky O’Neill, found his project “just kept growing and growing and growing” as he began to uncover more facets of O’Neill’s life.

“In October 2005 I moved to New York and brought the project with me,” he says. “Over the course of the next 2 1/2 years, I continued to shoot and edit,” now working with co-director Christian O’Neill, who is Nicky O’Neill’s older half brother. The film is now 116 minutes long and, says de Rezendes, “only 5 percent of that first cut made it into the completed film. That’s how much of a difference there was.”

De Rezendes had met the O’Neills after being hired, through the graces of a family friend, to tape for posterity Night of the Angels, an earlier tribute to Nicky O’Neill that was performed on the Stadium stage on the first anniversary of the Station fire in 2004. Through that, de Rezendes got to know Christian O’Neill, a local theater director who wanted to further his own interest in filmmaking. At the urgings of O’Neill, who had in the meantime cast de Rezendes as the romantic lead in a stage production of Miracle on 34th Street at the Stadium, de Rezendes was signed to film They Walk Among Us.

But de Rezendes had already had a strange brush with Nicky O’Neill while visiting the grave of one of his own family members in a Pawtucket cemetery in April 2003. At one point he looked down and found himself standing on Nicky O’Neill’s grave. When he later met Nicky’s family and began working with them, that moment came back to him. This was even before de Rezendes began noticing coincidences in his own life involving the number 41, which was Nicky O’Neill’s favorite number and which gives the movie its title.

Coincidentally, Christian O’Neill later moved to Brooklyn himself, where he is pursuing a MFA at Brooklyn College. In fact, he and his wife live on the same street as de Rezendes and his wife, although their apartments are miles apart. The fact that they now lived so close “made it convenient from the perspective of editing 41,” says O’Neill, whose library of film and video footage of Nicky from childhood to shortly before his death provided de Rezendes the background material which is used extensively on screen.

For O’Neill, it wasn’t always easy to look back on the life of his late brother. “I’ll work on it with Christian for awhile and then get numb to (my feelings about the Station tragedy.) But if I leave working on it for awhile, when I come back to it, it hits me again. It’s very difficult to be open with an audience about it. It’s a very vulnerable feeling.”

O’Neill’s own interview is used throughout much of the film to explain family relationships. De Rezendes recalls that at the time, “He told me he would speak for only 15 minutes, but wound up speaking for 50 minutes.”

De Rezendes also appears occasionally in the film to discuss his own connection to the project. “I never wanted to put myself in the film,” he says. “I felt I had to because of what happened, and that with all the concerns that went with doing so, I felt it was ultimately justified because Nick O’Neill’s work and ‘plan’ eventually manifested through me. The ‘41’ incidents I talk about, work as a personal validation that I was meant to tell his story with Chris O’Neill as a creative partner.”

Much of the second half of 41 revolves around Nicky’s obsession with that number and the strange coincidences that have brought the number 41 to the forefront today in the lives of his family and friends. There are so many of them that many didn’t make it into the film, “Like when your Mom’s stove clock stopped at 3:41 for a week and then just started on its own,” says de Rezendes. Or the fact that O’Neill has had electronic gear start up on its own at 9:41 p.m. Some of these things, promises de Rezendes, will turn up in bonus material on the DVD release they’ve planned for the future.

The film has already played at film festivals on Cape Cod and in Canada, where it won the best narrative documentary award at the Blue Mountain Film Festival. It will be shown next month at the Northampton Film Festival. They had considered waiting to show it at the Stadium until the next Station anniversary in February, but felt it would be too long a wait for a film that had been finished months ago and has a lot of local interest.

Of course, the Stadium’s Sunday afternoon screening also is bound to bring up sad memories from the audience. “I think the beginning and the end of the film will be very difficult for people who were touched by the fire,” says de Rezendes. “They were the most emotionally difficult parts for me to put together.”

He adds that they had wondered about placing the Stadium screening so close to Halloween, considering its eerie tone. But in the end they felt their film had nothing to do with that holiday, even though the O’Neill family has consulted mediums in hopes of getting closer to Nicky, something that’s depicted in the film. “I don’t think of it as creepy or spooky,” O’Neill says, “but as spiritual.

“This is hard for us. For us this is a local story, but I hope it’s not just a local story. It’s a universal enough story with uncanny spirituality that should appeal to anyone who ever loved anyone.”

41 will be shown at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Stadium Theater in Woonsocket. It will be introduced by Dave Kane, Nicky O’Neill’s father. Tickets, at the door, are $15. The Web site is www.41themovie.com.

mjanuson@projo.com