Be Water

Be Water (2020) is Bao Nguyen's documentary about Bruce Lee, and you can watch online on iFILM a portrait that cares less about the fights than about the man behind them. Nguyen drops the all-knowing narrator almost entirely; the story is carried by archival reels, home footage, and Lee's own writings.

The starting point is 1971. Hollywood has turned him away, unwilling to hand an Asian actor a leading role, so Lee goes back to Hong Kong and makes four films that reshape the genre. The whole movie lives in that gap between two worlds — an America where he never quite belonged and a Hong Kong he returned to as someone changed. The voices come from people who knew him: his widow Linda Lee Cadwell, his daughter Shannon, friends and students, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The title borrows Lee's own line about water — yielding yet unstoppable — and the film follows that idea, moving quietly around the myth to find the restless, ambitious, sometimes wounded person underneath. If you only know Lee from the screen, this opens a very different chapter. Stream Be Water (2020) online on iFILM.