Friday, June 13
5:45 PM - 7:30 PM

Regal Gallery Place

701 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001

Speak.

Director

Jennifer Tiexiera

Co-Director

Guy Mossman

Executive Producers

Josh Gad, Simon Kilmurry, 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, J. Todd Harris, Melony and Adam Lewis, Andrea Van Beuren

Producers

Pamela Griner, Guy Mossman, Jennifer Tiexiera

Editors

Delaney Lynch, Jennifer Tiexiera

Consulting Editor

Co-Editor

Assistant Editor

Cinematographer

Guy Mossman

Additional Cinematography

Music

Osei Essed

Sound

Narration

Contact

Follow five of the nation’s top teenage speech competitors as they experience the euphoria of victory and the sting of defeat, crafting and performing original orations over the course of a nine-month season. Their goal: to win the Super Bowl of public speaking, the NSDA Nationals.

SPEAK. takes us behind the scenes with the competitors, their coaches, and their parents, all fighting to keep school speech programs alive amid budget cuts, book bans, and rising censorship—issues that reach a boiling point during the 2024 election year.

Beginning at the 2023 National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) Championships, we meet Noor, Noah, Sam, Mfaz, and Esther, the two-time reigning national champion in Oratory. We follow them to the 2024 Nationals, where Esther is determined to break the record set by SPEAK.’s Executive Producer, Josh Gad, in 1999.

SPEAK. captures the passion, joy, and courage of these unforgettable teens as they use their voices to change hearts and minds. This film is an inspiring antidote for these fraught times—intense, funny, and, above all, hopeful.

Director, Speak.

Jennifer Tiexiera is an award-winning documentary director, producer, and editor who most recently helmed the Emmy-nominated series, Unveiled: Surviving La Luz del Mundo for HBO, and the feature-length documentary, Subject, which made its debut at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. In 2020, she completed P.S. Burn This Letter Please, which debuted at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and won the Audience Award for Documentary Feature at the 2020 OutFest Film Festival. Previously, she edited 17 Blocks, which was awarded Best Editing in a Documentary Feature Film at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Other highlights include editing and producing the documentaries, A Suitable Girl, winner of the Albert Maysles Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, and Waiting for Hassana, official selection of the Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto Film Festivals. Other career highlights include editing the documentary Salam Neighbor, and the 2011 SXSW Documentary Grand Jury winner, Dragonslayer.

Co-Director, Speak.

Guy Mossman is an American cinematographer and director who made his first short film in 2000 in Paraguay. In 2002, he was awarded a prestigious Park Fellowship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to pursue an M.A. in Journalism and Documentary Filmmaking. Since then, Guy has dedicated himself to lensing documentary films, non-fiction television, and commercials. His love of character and vérité storytelling, and an eye for light and composition, has been acknowledged by critics and directors alike. Guy is best known for his dramatic photography on the Oscar short-listed documentary film, Buck, which won the Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, as well as Mariachi High, Bending the Arc, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award-winning Feels Good Man, and Discovery Doc’s The Lost Lincoln — executive produced by Mark Wahlberg. In 2022, Guy co-directed the critically acclaimed documentary The Human Trial with his wife, Lisa Hepner. His camera work on Buck was singled out in the Los Angeles Times for being ‘both beautiful and evocative’; and the LA Times TV critic Robert Lloyd said of the 2014 Los Jets, ‘he gives every element its due; the clamor, the quiet, the details of décor and decoration, the richness of the landscape, the look of air under floodlights.’