EXCLUSIVE: A thousand words.
That’s roughly the verbal real estate available to the high schoolers who compete for the crown each year at the National Speech and Debate Association Championships (NSDA) in the category of Original Oratory. Such future luminaries as Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, Josh Gad, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson all participated as teens.
In the documentary Speak. a new batch of remarkable young people makes their bid for the title in what has been called the “Super Bowl of public speaking.” Parameters: “Students deliver a self-written, ten-minute speech on a topic of their choosing,” per the NSDA. “Competitors craft an argument using evidence, logic, and emotional appeals. Topics range widely, and can be informative or persuasive in nature. The speech is delivered from memory.”
The film directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and co-directed by Guy Mossman, who also served as director of photography, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. It opens September 19 at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film in New York City in a theatrical run that will qualify it for Oscar consideration. Watch the exclusive trailer for Speak. above.
“Speak. follows five of the nation’s top teenage speech competitors, capturing the euphoria of victory and the devastation of defeat as they craft and perform original oratories over the course of a 9-month season,” notes a synopsis. “We witness them, their coaches and their parents as they fight to keep school speech programs alive amid budget cuts, book bans and censorship efforts that reach a fevered pitch during the 2024 election year.”
The synopsis adds, “Speak. captures the passion, joy and courage of unforgettable teens using their voices to change hearts and minds. This film is the perfect antidote for these fraught times in America – intense, funny, and most of all, hopeful.”
One of the five teens at the center of the film — Esther Oyetunji – was going for an unprecedented third straight national title in Original Oratory. At Sundance, Tiexiera told us she got interested in the documentary project after co-director Mossman sent her a video of Esther in a spellbinding oratorical display.
“He sent me Esther doing her speech her sophomore year when she became the national champion for the first time,” Tiexiera recalled. “It was definitely a moment where it was like hearing Obama speak for the first time and I was like, ‘This girl is so young and so brilliant.’”
While there is inherent drama in a competition involving hopes, dreams, and nerves, Mossman emphasizes the film’s larger dimensions.
“We wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the piece that they’re writing — if you can conceive of that as the piece they’re writing as a character in and of itself — and allow the competition to be almost present but not necessarily in the foreground,” Mossman told us. “What’s more important to us is to really spend time… at home with them and to try and tell a really intimate story about their lives and how it tied into the piece they’re writing.”
Josh Gad, one of the executive producers of the film, won the NSDA championships in Original Oratory in 1998 and 1999. Fellow EPs include Simon Kilmurry (who serves on the A.M.P.A.S. Board of Governors for the documentary branch), Lisa Hepner, Christoph Baaden, Abby Ellin, Joseph Wolfe, Polly Wolfe, Schultz Family Foundation, Hallee Adelman, Dawn Bonder, Daniel J. Chalfen, Marci Wiseman, Toby Nalbandian, Greg Schmidt, Sean Bradley, Lauren Lexton, Jenny Warburg, Jamie Wolf, Nathalie Seaver, Melony and Adam Lewis, J. Todd Harris, and Andrea Van Beuren.
Speak. is produced by Pamela Griner, Guy Mossman, and Jennifer Tiexiera. Delaney Lynch and Jennifer Tiexiera edited the film. As noted above, Mossman shot the film. The original score was composed by Osei Essed.
Watch the Speak. trailer above.
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