SEX RADICAL is a documentary-drama about the 19th-century sex reformer, Ida Craddock, a pioneering feminist and religious mystic who became one of the first casualties of America’s long war on sexual speech. With a script drawn entirely from letters, trial records, sex education pamphlets, unpublished diaries, and other historical documents, the movie tells Craddock’s true story through a stylized montage of documentary evidence, archival film, and dramatized performance.

Narrated in the voice of the iconic feminist Emma Goldman — who called Craddock “one of the bravest champions of Women’s Emancipation” — Sex Radical looks back to the stifling social atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, a pivotal period in the history of sexuality in America and Europe. The film dramatizes Craddock’s bold challenge to traditional Victorian morality through a creative reenactment of her writings and lectures on female sexual pleasure, contraception, and the spiritual dimensions of erotic life. Craddock’s ideas — radical even by reformist standards — placed her in direct conflict with Anthony Comstock, a puritanical “vice-hunter” and federal “special agent” financed by America’s richest men.

As Craddock is pursued across cities, arrested repeatedly, betrayed by allies, and forced to turn over her books for burning, the film stages a larger confrontation between sexual knowledge and moral policing, between bodily autonomy and institutional power. By weaving humor, tragedy, and polemic, Sex Radical reframes an obscure legal case as a foundational episode in the history of free speech and reproductive rights. The film asks how a society decides which ideas are too dangerous to circulate—and why the most threatening ideas so often come from women speaking honestly about their own bodies.