“Someone once told me. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Bruce Lee is a Hollywood legend, so it’s no wonder why the film industry never stops producing movies about the martial artist. In director George Nolfi “Birth Of The Dragon”, Hong Kong- born American actor Philip Ng (伍允龙) stars as a self-absorb Bruce Lee while Xia Yu (夏雨) plays Wong Jack Man, a Northern Shaolin teacher. The film made its debut at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
Set in the mid-60s, the film centres around the legendary fight between the 2 masters in San Francisco. Accounts of the fight are controversial because it was unrecorded and held in private.
There are 2 versions of the story: Bruce Lee’s wife’s description, which claimed that Lee won the fight in 3 minutes, and Wong’s account, which stated that the fight lasted an unusually long 20–25 minutes. According to Collider, the fight inspired Lee to create his Jeet Kune Do technique.
The official synopsis is as below:
“An affectionate nod to the classic Kung Fu films of the 1970s, ‘Birth Of The Dragon’ is a dramatisation of the much disputed fight between Kung Fu greats Bruce Lee and Shaolin Master Wong Jack Man in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1964. Based on Michael Dorgan’s magazine article, ‘Bruce Lee’s Toughest Fight’ the film is written by Chris Wilkinson and Stephen J. Rivele, the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of ‘Ali’ and ‘Nixon’. They wove together many conflicting accounts of the actual fight and added in fictional characters Steve McKee (played by Billy Magnussen) and female lead Xiulan (played by JingJing Qu), whose fates become entwined in the outcome of the fight.”
Watch the trailer below:
No official release date has been announced yet, but we’ll update this post as soon as we get ’em 😉
Source: Collider / Featured image: Variety.
