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Banned Singaporean martial arts film is now on YouTube after 45 years

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Ring Of Fury, a Singaporean martial arts film that was banned for over 30 years, is now available on YouTube.

Released in 1973, the film was rejected by censors in the country and not approved for public screenings due to its “portrayal of gangsterism and vigilantism at a time when Singapore was aggressively ‘cleaning up’ its national public image,” says the Asian Film Archive (AFA).

The notorious film was eventually shown for the first time in 2005, at a local film festival in Singapore, before being restored by the AFA in 2017.

It is now widely available to watch for the first time – screen it below.

Ring Of Fury stars real life karate master Peter Chong, who spoke in an interview in 2017 about why he thought the film was censored back in the ’70s.

“It’s a real story of Singapore in the late 1960s when we still had gangs around collecting protection money. (But the censors) said that you can’t take the law into your hands,” Chong said.

It has also been revealed that Chong held the only copy of the film for many years, and kept it inside a fridge to preserve it until the AFA restored it in 2017.







The film is thought of as Singapore’s one and only martial arts film. Inspired by Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, released in the previous year, Ring Of Fury tells the story of a noodle seller who learned kung fu in order to avenge his family.

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