OTTAWA – While saying the film Sex: The Annabel Chong Story didn’t violate any of the broadcasters codes of ethics, viewer advisories coming back from commercial are needed – even with a midnight air time, says the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
The national specialty services panel told The Documentary Channel (which aired the movie on May 10, 2005 at midnight) that it should have broadcast viewer advisories because of the sexually explicit content and coarse language.
The subject of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story was Grace Quek, a pornographic movie actress who performed under the screen name Annabel Chong. The film included interviews with Quek herself, as well as with friends, family, teachers and employers. It also featured clips from some of Chong’s porn movies and sexually explicit dialogue. “A viewer complained that this sexually explicit program was not a documentary at all because of its subject matter, was inappropriate broadcast fare for a serious documentary channel, and was degrading to women in general and Asian women in particular,” says the CBSC release.
“The Panel observed, first, that nothing in the subject matter of the film was incompatible with its status as a documentary; there was no reason why a documentary ‘cannot also be, by way of example, a comedic, musical, or even particularly sexually explicit documentary.’ As the Panel decided, ‘the subject of the film does not change the nature of the program for’” and The Documentary Channel was fully entitled to broadcast a documentary with a sexual theme,” it said.
It also concluded that, although the documentary was about the porn industry, it was not exploitative of women and the Panel did not find any “negative statement being made about [her] on the basis of her race.”
