He was 51 and penniless when he arrived in Hong Kong, separated from his family and destitute. Beyond being Bruce Lee’s beloved “sifu,” Ip Man was a key figure in 20th-century martial arts, credited with perpetuating the popularity of Wing Chun as a style, and his life feels more obviously cinematic than most, peppered as it is with triumph and agony… We see representations of Ip Man in a couple of older Bruceploitation movies like Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (1976) and later in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) but – astonishingly – it took until 2008 to get a full-length feature about his life. Perhaps because these films were mostly sold to the west, one part of Bruce’s life that was rarely explored was his early life in Hong Kong and his Wing Chun training with Ip Man. Lookalikes with new names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Bruce Leung became some of the most prolific kung fu stars of the era, and “Bruceploitation” became a prominent subgenre. With the kung fu craze booming, almost every facet of Bruce’s life – and plenty of glorious nonsense like a fight against Dracula – got turned into a movie. After Bruce Lee’s death at the height of his fame in 1973, Hong Kong filmmakers raced to capitalize on his stardom.

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