John Gianvito’s new film, Her Socialist Smile, is a moving experiment in conveying Helen Keller’s left-wing politics. That we know so little of her avowed socialism is astonishing, because she was an extroverted firebrand who delivered hundreds of radical speeches during “a fifty-year run on the lecture circuit.”

Gianvito’s dedicates about a third of the film to some of the most remarkable passages from those speeches. This one, for example, Keller delivered during the run-up to the US’s entry into World War I, when the government was spending a billion dollars in preparation, recruiting a million soldiers, and on the verge of making it a crime to give speeches “interfering with recruitment”:

What have you to fight for? National independence? That means the masters’ independence. The laws that send you to jail when you demand better living conditions? The flag? Does it wave over a country where you are free and have a home, or does it rather symbolize a country that meets with you clenched fists when you strike for better wages and shorter hours?