At 76, karate master Peter Chong remains fighting fit. His handshake is strong and decisive and yes, he can still smash a brick in half with a lethal chop of his hand.

Sporting a ponytail and wearing a karategi, the sport's white uniform, he credits his vigour to his lifelong love and practice of the Japanese martial art.

The former president of the Singapore Karate Federation holds an eight dan black-belt in Kyokushin karate - the highest level is the 10th - and has been running a dojo tucked away in an upper parking level at Orchard Towers.

But this champion fighter and sensei is also a significant figure in local film history: he was the star of Singapore's first gongfu flick, Ring Of Fury (78 minutes, PG, 1973, Mandarin with English subtitles).

He plays a noodle-seller, Fei Pao, who seeks revenge on a group of thugs after they exact a price for his refusal to pay protection fees.

The film will be screened on Sept 8 at 8pm at the Gallery Theatre, National Museum of Singapore.

It was inspired by the Bruce Lee classic Fist Of Fury (1972) and both films are part of the line-up for Asian Restored Classics 2017.

The annual programme by the Asian Film Archive celebrates the best of Asian cinema and this year's edition has a special South-east Asian focus with offerings from Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Like many of the cast members in Ring Of Fury, Mr Chong was not a professional actor.

He was teaching karate in a dojo in Rosyth Avenue when he was approached by directors Tony Yeow and James Sebastian to be in a movie. Yeow died in 2015 and Sebastian now lives in Australia.

"I did not show much interest," he says. "They came about three or four times, persuading me, but I said I was not an actor and knew nothing about acting."

Eventually, he decided to give it a shot.

As Ring Of Fury was the first locally made martial arts flick, the production process was far from professional.

Besides having a cast largely comprising first-timers with no acting experience, actor welfare was sketchy.

Mr Chong recalls: "We had a fight at the granite quarry in Bukit Timah and there wasn't even a mattress on the ground. They said, 'If you fall, you fall.' And sometimes you might fall on small stones and it was painful."

Still, he says he enjoyed filming the fight scenes. What he had more trouble with were the emotional scenes, such as the one in which his on-screen mother's coffin gets lowered into the ground.

"They asked me to concentrate on my mother, as though she had gone. I don't know how I could (cry) like that. That was one take only, amazing. But actually, I hated those sad scenes."

Unfortunately, the film ran afoul of the authorities for its depiction of gangsterism.

He says: "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."

The film was also dogged by financial woes. It was made on a shoestring budget of between $80,000 and $100,000, but Mr Chong says that the film-makers did not have enough money to pay him. So they gave him the 35mm print of the film, all 10 reels of it.

For years, they sat in a refrigerator in his home, wrapped up in newspaper.

The ban was eventually lifted in 1994 after some sex and nude scenes were cut.

Mr Chong regrets that he did not transfer the master copy of the film to video first before sending it to the censors as those scenes are now lost for good.

He never made another film, but it does not seem to be something that he regrets. After all, he had already found his calling in karate.

In 1966, at the age of 25, he packed his bags for Japan to learn from Masutatsu Oyama, a karate master who founded Kyokushin karate, a style of full contact karate. "I just wanted to be strong. Back in the kampung, I didn't know how to fight and when (the bullies) attacked me, I would use durian husks (to fight back)."

On his return in 1969, he started his own dojo. The grandfather of four is now semi-retired from his business - he ran a food court and then a coffee shop after retiring from the police force as assistant superintendent of police - but he still teaches karate, even travelling around the world for it.

Indeed, his Wikipedia entry is all about his achievements in karate and makes no mention of his brief stint as a film actor.

Still, he is happy that he had his moment on the big screen and says with a laugh: "If this film is properly released in Singapore with what they've restored, I think I'll be popular again."