The Disciple documentary tells the story of the one-copy Wu-Tang Clan album

The strangest object in Wu-Tang Clan's catalogue is getting a film. The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable, about the one-of-a-kind album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and arrives on Netflix on 16 October, SPIN reported.

Joanna Natasegara directed it, her first feature. The film follows Tarik Azzougarh, known as Cilvaringz, the Dutch-Moroccan rapper and producer whose teenage fixation on the group ended with him inside it.

The route in was persistence. As a fan in the 1990s he kept at it until he was working and touring with the Clan and being mentored by RZA, and that relationship became the engine behind the album: 31 tracks recorded in secret over six years, built as a single work of art rather than a release.

One physical copy was made, housed in an ornate silver case, under contract terms that block any commercial release for 88 years. It sold at auction in 2015 for a reported 2 million dollars to the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, who then threatened to leak it and antagonised members of the group in public.

The United States government seized the copy and sold it in 2018. The buyer was never named, and because the restrictions travelled with the record, the sale brought the public no nearer to hearing it. The story reaches film in a year thick with hip-hop documentaries, among them an eight-part Jay-Z series made with Rick Rubin and one revisiting the 2016 XXL Freshman class.

RZA is an executive producer and a contributor. Natasegara, whose short The White Helmets won Netflix its first Oscar, said the secret album drew her in and the people around it kept her there: "I discovered so much more about why Tarik, myself and so many of us idolize them," she said.