Sex: The Annabel Chong Story | |
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Directed by | Gough Lewis |
Written by | Kelly Morris |
Produced by |
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Starring | Grace Quek |
Cinematography |
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Edited by | Kelly Morris |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Strand Releasing |
Release dates |
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Running time | 87 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $233,076 |
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is a 1999 American documentary film directed, filmed and produced by Canada-based producer Gough Lewis, edited by co-creator Kelly Morris, and produced by Peter Carr.
The film profiles pornographic film actor Grace Quek, a.k.a. Annabel Chong, then a gender studies student at the University of Southern California, famous for setting a gang bang record in January 1995. A video of the event was released under the title The World's Biggest Gang Bang . [1]
After release, Quek criticised Lewis for misconstruing multiple events and portraying events in a "misleading" way, such as claiming to have 'returned' to the industry after going to Singapore or the fact that producer Lewis self-harmed off-camera. [2]
The documentary explores Quek's experiences, presenting her life as a student in Los Angeles, California and London; her native Singapore; and in the porn industry. It focuses on her reasons for working in porn, and her relationship with friends and family. [3]
The documentary reveals that Quek was gang raped as a student living in London and describes her many complex emotional issues, including signs of depression, self-harm [3] and substance abuse. The film also includes footage of a painful conversation in Singapore between Annabel and her mother, who, until then, didn't know about her daughter's porn career. [3]
The documentary became a hit when it was released at the Sundance Film Festival, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. [4]
North American distribution was halted or minimized as a result of a court case in the Superior Court of Canada, as instigated by David Whitten, a B-movie distributor. [5]
In The Guardian , Jonathan Romney (2000) wrote, "Quek's refusal to cohere as a subject is contingent on the fact that there's apparently no one looking at her: director Lewis is curiously absent, as either a character or as an invisible shaping intelligence. But he apparently was a character in her story: in interviews, Quek has denounced him for failing to reveal that he was her lover for a year during the making of Sex, something the film never even implies. That omission contributes to making the film incomplete, if not actually dishonest." [6]
Grace Quek, known professionally as Annabel Chong, is a Singaporean former pornographic actress who became famous after starring in an adult film that was promoted as the World's Biggest Gang Bang. The film was commercially successful and started a trend of "record-breaking" gang bang pornography. Four years later, Quek was the subject of the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, in which she was interviewed about her pornography career. She retired from the adult industry completely in 2003 to work in software engineering.
John Curtis Holmes, better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd, was an American pornographic film actor. He ranks among the most prolific adult film performers, with documented credits for at least 573 films.
The World's Biggest Gang Bang is a pornographic film staged in a Hollywood studio starring Annabel Chong and billed as her having sex with 300 men. In reality, the participants were far fewer than advertised. They are said to have engaged with Chong in a total of 251 sex acts. The event was organized by pornographic film director John T. Bone.
A gang bang is a sexual activity in which one person is the central focus of the sexual activity of several people, usually more than three, sequentially or simultaneously. The term generally refers to a woman being the focus; one man with multiple women can be referred to as a "reverse gang bang". The term has become associated with the porn industry and usually describes a staged event whereby a woman has sex with several men in direct succession. Bukkake is a type of gang bang, originating in Japan, that focuses on the central person being ejaculated upon by male participants.
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