A whole picture of Bruce Lee the person: documentary Be Water’s director on martial arts superstar’s vulnerable side and his outsider status in US

Premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Bao Nguyen’s personal take on Bruce Lee shows how he struggled early on in America

Its includes rare interview with Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell and with daughter Shannon Lee, and archival footage that keeps viewers in the moment

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Bruce Lee with his mother and siblings in Hong Kong in the 1950s. “People in Hong Kong maybe didn’t understand how much Bruce felt like an outsider when he was in America,” says Bao Nguyen, director of documentary Be Water. Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Helen Barlow

Published: 5:00am, 4 Feb 2020Updated: 11:56am, 9 Jun 2020

What can we expect in a new Bruce Lee documentary that we haven’t already seen in previous productions?

By drawing on his own personal experience, Vietnamese-American director Bao Nguyen (Live from New York!), who lives between Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, has delivered something fresh with Be Water, a personal take on the challenges the martial arts superstar faced as he lived between Hong Kong and America.

When the film premiered last week in the US documentaries competition at the Sundance Film Festival in the American state of Utah, its British producer Julia Nottingham noted how, after the screening, a Bruce Lee “superfan” came up to her and admitted “he knew about everything in the film, yet he’d never seen it all in one movie”.

Having gained the family’s permission, Nguyen benefited from unprecedented access to archival material, which was essential, as it is primarily a film told in the past. Several of Lee’s old friends appear in interviews; hearing from his widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, and daughter Shannon Lee is particularly special.

“Having Linda do this film was such a feat because she hasn’t done an interview about Bruce in a long time,” says Nguyen in an interview with the Post.