I passed on seeing Bigger Stronger Faster when it opened the Hot Docs festival in Toronto some weeks ago because the subject didn’t sound interesting to me. A documentary about the horrors of steroid abuse and their corruption of professional sports? Yeah, whatever. But debuting filmmaker Chris Bell has created something considerably more noteworthy than another cautionary film.

The first quarter-hour of Children of Huang Shi flies by so energetically, with derring-do and crashing incidents, that a filmgoer may easily confuse the picture with a large-scaled historical romance. But Roger Spottiswoode’s picture, while an epic of sorts, is not one of those. Its biographical story portrays an odyssey of rare personal sacrifice and heroism.

He’s a superhero who doesn’t have a cape or skintight costume. He doesn’t have a secret identity. He doesn’t even have a superhero name, like Fill-in-the-Blank Man.