We are pleased to support the screening and discussion of Sex Radical as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival organized by Cinema St. Louis. After the screening, Professor Leigh Schmidt will moderate a discussion between the audience and the filmmaker Andy Kirshner.

Reserve your free ticket at: https://festivals.cinemastlouis.org/sliff2025/movies/sex-radical/.

Film Description
New laws limit access to abortion and threaten doctors with prison. Christian Nationalists and opportunistic politicians team up to ban books about sex and to “protect” children from their “corrupting” influence. Sound familiar? Welcome to America under the Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the distribution of any information about sex, contraception, or abortion through the U.S. Mail for nearly 60 years.

Sex Radical tells the story of one woman who dared to challenge that law, and its namesake, the puritanical “vice-hunter,” Anthony Comstock. Ida Craddock was a late-Victorian sex educator, scholar, and religious 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 for newly married couples. 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. Sex Radical retrieves a forgotten story from the past so that we may more fully understand the present.

About the director
Andy Kirshner (writer, director, composer) uses film, theatre, music, dance, and archival research to explore complex social and historical questions. His previous documentary-drama, Manufacturing Hate: 10
Questions for Henry Ford, screened at festivals around the U.S., including the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His first feature, a girl-meets-girl movie-musical and satire of American politics called Liberty’s Secret (2016), is available on streaming channels internationally. An award-winning composer as well as filmmaker, his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council on the Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Dia Art Foundation, among many others. Kirshner is Professor Emeritus of Music and Art & Design at the University of Michigan, where he taught for 25 years.