MUMBAI: Aarif Rahman, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter who made his acting debut in Echoes has been signed to play the young Bruce Lee in the Bruce Lee biopic Bruce Lee, My Brother.

The film relates the early life story of him who put Hong Kong action films on the map, its director Raymond Yip has said. The film pieces together the superstar‘s childhood as related by his four surviving siblings, Phoebe, Agnes, Peter and Robert.

Said Yip, "The Lee family supplied us with all the details and the tidbits of their family life.So we took great care to be loyal to the truth and avoid anything that felt fake, which made it rather difficult for us in terms of creating the structure of the script. But the Lee family was very pleased with the result, especially with how close it was to what actually happened."

The biopic took years to put on the screen because of the difficult task of finding a young actor to play the role of the iconic megastar. "We‘ve been on the lookout for a possible candidate all over China since 2008, but no one could capture the Hong Kong spirit of the young Bruce Lee till we met Rahman," Yip explained.

But when writer-director team of Alex Law and Mabel Cheung, invited the film‘s producer, Manfred Wong, to a screening of their opus Echoes of the Rainbow, the search was over. We chose Rahman to play the young Lee. The Hong Kong-born Rahman, of Malay-Arab-Chinese ancestry, will have to shoulder any potential sequels for the Bruce Lee life story, said Yip.

The film that started rolling in March is scheduled for a 25 November release in Hong Kong.