SEX: THE ANNABEL CHONG STORY

Rome, circa 40 A.D.: Messalina, wife of Claudius I, reputedly wins a high-profile bet with a prostitute in a marathon intercourse session involving as many of the city's males as she can. America, January 19, 1995: Annabel Chong does 251 men in ten hours to earn the title “World's Biggest Gang Bang.” The event, recorded in a top-selling video of the same name, made Chong a superstar of porn, international trash-TV talk, and even a feted guest of the Cambridge University Debating Society. But who or what is Annabel Chong? Gough Lewis' cameras go in deep – some would say, voyeuristically so – into the pathography of how a pretty Singapore schoolgirl named Grace Quek, born to a nice Christian family, turned into a no-apologies, bisexual, USC student who, after claiming she'd finished with everyone on campus, devled into explicit acting in hardcore videos (like “I Can't Believe I Did the Whole Team”). Is Quek/Chong the uninhibited, subversive artist triumphing over a gutter business that degrades women and sexuality, or merely its ultimate victim? And what does that make the viewer? One thing is for certain: SEX will leave no one undisturbed. And we all know what happened to the Roman empire. Adults only. (Partially in Mandarin with English subtitles)