Look right into the camera lens, right here and tell us your name.
My last name is Lee.
Bruce Lee.
[Bao] My name is Bao Nguyen and I'm a Vietnamese-American filmmaker.
Our most recent project Be Water is a documentary about Bruce Lee.
Be water, my friend.
[Bao] I don't think there's been a documentary about Bruce Lee by an Asian-American.
The idea of Bruce Lee and his Asian-American identity is really worth exploring.
Because he was always kind of struggling with his American identity
and I think a lot of immigrant Americans or me
it's always been tough where I grew up.
Do you still think of yourself as Chinese or do you consider yourself North American?
You know I want to think of myself as a human being.
[Bao] My parents were Vietnamese war refugees.
They left Vietnam in the late 1970s and they were on a boat for about two weeks
before finding their way onto shore in Hong Kong.
Then they got sponsored to come to America.
And I was born a few years after that.
[Narrator] He had big dreams, big aspirations.
[Narrator] America was not ready for an Asian hero.
[Bao] The struggles that Bruce Lee faced in terms of prejudice, discrimination and identity
are issues that we still face today as a community.
Especially during the COVID pandemic.
And a lot of anti-Asian racism from not just the people interacting with strangers on the street
but to the top levels of the American government in many ways.
The idea of the shadow pandemic is really interesting to me.
For a few months and even now when I go outside in public
I'm scared to cough because I feel like everyone will look at me in a weird way immediately
and just kind of run away.
It's not a way to live in a multi-cultural, diverse country.
The reason that we're all here today is because of April Chen's final essay.
[Li] My new movie Stealing School is about a young Asian immigrant in a prestigious university in Toronto
who gets dragged into a plagiarism tribunal in her last week of school.
And if she's found to be cheating on her last essay she will not receive her degree.
Now you're a good kid.
You made a mistake and I can forgive you.
So long as you just admit what you did.
And apologize.
Apologize?
Yes.
I'm not a cheater.
[Li] My name is Li Dong.
I'm a filmmaker and I was born in China and I moved to Canada when I was five-years-old.
Yes, I did want to make the movie to reflect a certain experience that Asian immigrants
have to deal with here in Toronto.
People have a natural suspicion of you sometimes.
There's a perception that Asian students tend to cheat more.
That is virtually identical to what is in this essay right here.
So are you going to accuse me of plagiarizing myself?
[Li] She is naturally perceived to not be a good essay writer.
Or English-essay writer.
And that's just a stereotype that people have of her and it leads to her being discriminated against
later in the movie.
It's a real thing that I've dealt with even though I was an English major and I graduated with Honours.
People still are surprised that I write extremely well.
Or I'm very well spoken or my English is really good.
These are things that I still have to deal with and they're not outwardly damaging
in a way that is measurable but as I try to show in the movie
when people treat you like you're strange or you're something other than a normal Canadian
it can wear down on you.
I've tried to stay further than two metres away from people at grocery stores because
even if I'm two metres away from them they still think I'm a little bit too close.
And I've been aggressively told to like back away.
[Bao] All the instances of anti-Asian racism, harassment that's going on in America
and all over the world really
makes us rethink in some way, are we accepted in this country.
[Narrator] When Bruce moves to the U.S. his identity is suddenly a minority.
A Chinese minority in a white country.
He has to face the conundrum that all immigrants face.
Who am I going to be? What is my identity?
How do I express myself?
And how in U.S. society can I even be seen?
Hollywood is racist because America is racist and it's this vicious cycle
and I think that's really true because yeah, when we see negative portrayals on-screen of ourselves
that's how people treat us in real life in society.
And when people see us like that in society
then they're not willing to give us a chance to be something more on screen.
The thing that was the most hurtful was that they were very one-dimensional.
Which is something that I try to do very differently in my movie.
[Li] I think that the way that you improve the perception of a people
that have been portrayed poorly on screen for so long, is just to add layers of complexity to it.
That doesn't necessarily mean making characters better or good.
Or like strong or powerful and confident, things like that.
The most important part is to make them to be more interesting and more complex
and more like a full human being like we all are.