Film About Visionary Feminist to Premiere at SLIFF
“SEX RADICAL,” a documentary-drama about a pioneer in the struggle for free expression and women’s rights, Ida Craddock, will have its film festival premiere at the St. Louis International Film Festival on Nov. 13 at 7PM in Brown Hall Auditorium on the Washington University campus.
After the screening, Washington U. Professor Leigh Schmidt will moderate a discussion between the audience and the filmmaker, Andy Kirshner. The event is being co-sponsored by SLIFF and the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.
Tickets are available at bit.ly/sexradicalsliff. Press photos are available at bit.ly/sexradicalphotos
Short Video Clips available at bit.ly/sexradicalclips. Audio Clips available at bit.ly/sexradicalaudio.
Poster available at bit.ly/sexradicalposter Full Press Kit available at bit.ly/sexradicalpk
ST. LOUIS, MO (October 23, 2025) - For Immediate Release
New laws limit access to abortion and threaten doctors with prison. Religious zealots and opportunistic politicians team up to ban books about sex and to “protect” children from their “corrupting” influence. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in the late 19th-century under the Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the distribution of information about sex, contraception, or abortion through the U.S. Mail.
SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner, tells the story of one woman who dared to challenge that law, and its namesake, the puritanical “vice-hunter” and U.S. postal inspector, Anthony Comstock. Ida Craddock was a late-Victorian feminist, scholar, and sexual mystic who defied Comstock, face-to-face. Defending the right of a woman to “control her own person,” Craddock risked everything by publishing frank instructional pamphlets about sex. Though arrested multiple times, sentenced to prison, committed to an asylum, and forced to turn over her books for burning, Craddock was undeterred in her fight for women’s sexual equality and her own First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. The feminist icon, Emma Goldman, called her “one of the bravest champions of Women’s Emancipation,” and Craddock’s was the very first case to be taken up by the Free Speech League, a forerunner to modern civil liberties groups like the ACLU and PEN America.
Actor Emily-Sutton Smith in a dream-sequence from SEX RADICAL.
Drawing on archival documents — including diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and the preeminent “sex radical” periodicals of the time — Kirshner used Craddock’s own words as the basis for the screenplay. The tale of her nine-year personal struggle against Comstock’s censorship is recounted through a unique mixture of archival film, eyewitness testimony, dream sequences, and stylized reenactments. Emily Sutton-Smith plays Craddock, Joey Albright plays Anthony Comstock, and Priscilla Lindsay plays Emma Goldman, a contemporary of Craddock’s who serves as the film’s narrator.
Speaking of the film’s relevance for our own time, Kirshner says,
When I first started working on SEX RADICAL, I was struck, not only by Ida Craddock’s powerful story, but also by how closely the “culture wars” of the late 19th-century resemble the “culture wars” of today. Those social conflicts were also largely about sexuality and gender, and about the role that religion should or should not play in public life. But frankly, I never dreamed that the 1873 Comstock “obscenity” Law would be experiencing a revival in 2025. However, since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists have been calling for a renewed enforcement of the statute as a means of effecting a national ban on medication abortion. In fact, they have recently cited this 150-year-old “zombie” law in “wrongful death” lawsuits against abortion providers. It’s astonishing – but maybe not so astonishing if one takes a longer view of American History.
More information about the film is available at www.sexradicalmovie.com
More information about Andy Kirshner is available at www.andykirshner.com
Film trailer is here: Watch Trailer
Press photos are here: Get photos
For a full preview screener of the 76 minute film, please contact brenna@newhistoryfilms.com
CONTACT: Brenna Murphy, brenna@newhistoryfilms.com