The Miracle Worker (2000) on Netflix

Plot summary

Helen Keller, blind and deaf since an illness at nineteen months old, cannot communicate except through physical tantrums. On her family's plantation she is allowed to take food from other people's plates with her hands and to knock over or break what she likes, and her family looks on with pity. They love her but believe she is a savage child who will never learn, and they are close to sending her to an asylum. As a last resort they bring in Anne Sullivan, a teacher orphaned young who has trouble with her own eyesight. Anne means to teach Helen to behave and to give her language, spelling words into the girl's open palm, while Helen's father, Captain Arthur, doubts her authority and her soft-hearted mother, Kate, challenges her methods.