Written by Monte Merrick, the film is based on the life of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan’s struggles to teach her.

[1] Starring Hallie Kate Eisenberg as Keller and Alison Elliott as Sullivan, the film premiered on ABC as part of The Wonderful World of Disney on November 12, 2000.

[3] The film focuses on Anne Sullivan's struggle to draw the young Helen Keller, a blind and prelingually deaf girl, out of her world of darkness and silence during the 1880s.

She is barely pacified with candy when she throws a tantrum, and is headed toward mental institutionalization in an asylum when Anne enters her life as Helen's parents' last-ditch effort to avoid the inevitable.

Helen makes the connection that the words Anne has been spelling in her open palm are in reality the communicative representation of those things in the physical world around her.