Arnold Lim brings rural B.C. experience to The Bryce Lee Story at VIFF
A scene from Arnold Lim’s The Bryce Lee Story, a 1990s-set coming-of-age film making its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 5.
Photo credit: VIFF / The Bryce Lee Story
Thirteen-year-old Bryce Lee wants to make movies, and he wants the kids at his new school on Vancouver Island to take him seriously. He tells them he is related to Bruce Lee.
The lie gives Bryce immediate status and draws him into the orbit of the school film club, whose Godard-obsessed leader recruits him for an ambitious martial-arts production. It also drives Arnold Lim’s The Bryce Lee Story, a Canadian coming-of-age feature that will have its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 5.
Set on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, the film follows Bryce after he arrives in Canada from China and moves in with his uncle while his father remains behind. He makes homemade action movies with his younger sister and wants to become a filmmaker, while school brings anti-Asian prejudice and the difficulty of finding his place among his classmates. His supposed relationship to Bruce Lee is explicitly a fabrication within the story.
For Lim, the setting intersects with his own history in British Columbia. VIFF says he drew from his upbringing in rural B.C. while making the film, and its high-school program describes The Bryce Lee Story as inspired by his experiences. Lim is a Korean-Canadian writer, director and producer who now lives in Victoria; his own biography says he “hails from Victoria, B.C.”
Rural B.C. in the early 1990s had already appeared directly in Lim’s filmmaking. His 2022 short My Name is Arnold follows a Korean-Canadian boy adjusting after moving with his single mother to a small rural community in the province. The film screened through Victoria’s CineVic and won Outstanding BC Film at the 2023 Short Circuit Pacific Rim Film Festival, along with awards for Lim’s direction and screenplay.
How much of Bryce’s story comes directly from Lim’s childhood is less clear from the public record. The film has a development history extending well before its current screenplay: PAGE International Screenwriting Awards lists a screenplay called The Bryce Lee Story by Dale Shuen among its 2009 comedy semifinalists. A staged reading of the current Telefilm-funded project in Vancouver in April 2025 credited Arnold Lim, Connor Gaston, Kyle D’Odorico and Mo Bradley as writers, with “Story by Dale Shuen.”
Those records establish Shuen’s earlier connection to the project while VIFF separately establishes Lim’s use of his own rural-B.C. experiences in the finished film. They do not identify which characters, scenes or incidents were drawn from Lim’s life, and the available 2009 PAGE record provides a title and writer rather than a synopsis of that earlier screenplay.
The finished feature was made close to Lim’s current home. The filmmakers’ production materials listed Greater Victoria as the shoot location, while CineVic says filming took place in the summer of 2025 with support from Victoria-area crew, including several of its members.
The Canadian financing is similarly local in part. Creative BC awarded The Bryce Lee Story $120,000 in scripted feature production financing to Flying Nunchucks Films Ltd., listing Lynne Lee and Arnold Lim as producers. The film’s official production site identifies Telefilm Canada and Creative BC as its funding sources, and VIFF describes it as Lim’s second Telefilm-funded feature.
Creative BC’s funding announcement also captured Lim’s interest in making the feature where he lives. Describing himself as a filmmaker based in a smaller region, he said he was grateful for the opportunity to shoot the film “in the community I call home.”
VIFF credits Lim and Lynne Lee as producers, with Canadian producer Raymond Massey as executive producer. The screenplay credits go to Kyle D’Odorico, Lim, Connor Gaston and Mo Bradley. Rickie Wang, Cordelia Chao and Benny Wang are the principal cast members listed by the festival, with Wang playing Bryce.
The film comes after a long transition in Lim’s own career. Before directing features, he spent close to two decades working as a photo and video journalist and served as a photography manager at five Olympic Games. He later went through the National Screen Institute’s Features First program with All-in Madonna, his first feature, developed with writer Susie Winters. NSI records show the project was selected for Features First in 2017 before its world premiere at the Whistler Film Festival on Dec. 9, 2020.
Lim continued making shorts between his two features. He directed and co-wrote Obscura with Claire Mulligan, a project that received the Directors Guild of Canada BC Greenlight award. At the 2024 Leo Awards, Obscura won Best Short Drama, with Lim, Lynne Lee and Mulligan credited as producers, while Lim and Mulligan won Best Screenwriting in a Short Drama.
The Bryce Lee Story now returns Lim to the festival circuit with a feature filmed on Vancouver Island and centred on a teenager trying to make his own movies there. Its world premiere is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 5 at 7 p.m. at International Village 10 during VIFF, followed by a second screening Tuesday, Oct. 6 at 3:45 p.m.
