Grace Qek, better known in her particular industry as Annabel Chong, is not your average porn star. In Sex:The Annabel Chong Story, she reveals to her morther for the first time the truth about what she does for a living.

It's not quite The Three Faces Of Eve, but you do need to nail things down a bit. On the one hand, there is Grace Qek, a highly intelligent, Singapore-born, one-time student of law at King's College, London, and graduate in fine arts from the University of Southern California with a specialisation in gender studies.

Then there's Annabel Chong, porn star, who held the world record in fucking. She fucked 251 men over a 10-hour period on January 19, 1995, in front of the cameras, on a porn-shoot set in Los Angeles, doubling the record set by an Amsterdam sex worker.

"Sex worker" is what it says in the press notes, the language of political correctness having also invaded the fantasy world of prostitution and porn. Annabel was going for 300, but some idiot forgot to trim his fingernails and scratched her, so she stopped at 251, having worked for the past nine-and-three-quarter hours on a five-at-a-time basis, ending with the legendary Ron Jeremy, a fat, hairy porn star with an ugly mustache, a wicked sense of humour and an extremely versatile dick.

Split pesonality

Grace and Annabel are, of course, the same person, but Grace managed to remain private until earlier this year, when the bluntly titled Sex: The Annabel Chong Story screened at Sundance.

"I think Annabel is more a persona that I put on to express a certain side of myself," says Grace, with an accent that veers alarmingly between English (the accent of her English-language education) and southern Californian. "But then again, we all play certain roles. I'm a different person in front of my parents, in front of my friends, as Grace the documentary subject, as Annabel Chong the porn star, as Annabel Chong the porn director... So I think we are never ourselves, we just practise."

"If you practise a lot," I ask, "do you think you ever get it right?"

"I think when people get it right they make themselves into a self-parody. A lot of rock stars end up that way."

It's sometimes difficult to reconcile the sharpness of Qek's observations with the Californian psycho-babble that comes out in certain moments of the film, especially those that have to do with her parents.

Qek agreed to let film-maker Gough Lewis and his small, not especially competent crew, film the moment when she tells her mother, a nice, middle-aged, respectable, food-providing Chinese lady, what she does for a living. Her mum is devastated, sobbing in extreme close-up. But when it comes to discussing this moment, Grace can't see beyond her own dilemma.

"A lot of my friends are gay, and they talk to me about the idea of coming out, and in a sense this is a coming-out movie, right?" she says, in response to my question about whether she had any misgivings about living through this key moment in her mother's life with the cameras rolling.

"It's all about trying to get rid of that stigma by not hiding anything and trying to have them trust me, so at some point I felt really bad about lying to them; I just thought I was untrue to myself."

In the film she says she needed to regain her parents' trust after the revelation: had she done this?

"Yeah, well I've stopped hiding anything from them, right? I'm back in the industry, directing and producing my own stuff and I'm honest about it and I make a good living out of it," says Qek.

Have her parents seen the film?

"No, they haven't. I was supposed to fly them down in November but, due to clashing schedules, they couldn't make it." Would she like them to see the film?

"I would like them to see the film if only out of courtesy to me."

It's this complete self-obsession - whether talking about relations with her parents or the joy of sex - that makes the movie so fascinating, not the revelations about the porn industry (which, refreshingly, she refers to as "porn", rather than the appallingly mealy-mouthed "adult"), or even the stuff about her breaking spectacularly out from the comfortable repression that is Singapore.

"I mean, it's a system that works for certain people," says Qek. "I just didn't take to it very well." Nor it to her, judging by the scenes of her prodigal return.

But the upshot of the buzz that the movie created at Sundance - not to mention the sales stampede it has reportedly occasioned in Cannes - has been a final breakdown in the Annabel/Grace divide.

"Let me just tell you about this incident that happened at Sundance," says Qek. "I'm usually billed up as Annabel Chong, right? So that gives Grace a bit of privacy. But, when Sundance happened, I was supposed to give a talk and they billed me as Grace Qek. That felt strange, because Grace is not public domain, you know? Grace is that little part of myself that no one really knows about. It was a very soul-searching moment for me."

A new direction

Now investigating the possibility of doing a master's degree at NYU, Grace and Annabel are also the latest in a long line of porno directors to attempt to push the envelope of the genre a little.

"I'm interested in the idea of narrative that has sex in it, whether it's in a porno movie or in a mainstream film. You have the plot. Then people fuck. Then the story happens again. Buy why can't sex tell a story? A lot of times in life, it happens during a sexual act, and maybe that's a story that should be told. You don't have to have dialogue, just sex: you show character development and a relationship building during the sexual act. You know, that's how people have sex."