Speak.
Directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman
Five top-ranked high school oratory students spend a year crafting spellbinding spoken word performances with the dream of winning one of the world’s largest and most intense public speaking competitions.
Directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman take us behind the scenes of the prestigious competition that’s seen Oprah, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Josh Gad, and Brad Pitt compete. The film provides a heartfelt glimpse into the lives of five competitors — raising prized pigs, managing TikTok fame, dating, and navigating complicated family dynamics — all while handling the immense pressure of striving for a championship title.
Filmmakers' Bios
Jennifer Tiexiera
Jennifer 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, and 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.
Guy Mossman
Guy 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 also won the Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival,
Mariachi High, Bending The Arc, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award-winning Feels Good Man, and Discovery Doc’s The Lost Lincoln — EP’ed by Mark
Wahlberg.
Josh Gad
Josh is an American actor, singer, and comedian. He is known for voicing Olaf in the “Frozen” franchise, playing Elder Arnold Cunningham in the Broadway musical “The Book
of Mormon,” and LeFou in the live-action adaptation of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.”
For his role as Olaf, Gad won two Annie Awards, and for his work in “The Book of Mormon,” he received a Grammy Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a
Musical. In film, Gad has starred in hit films such “Murder on the Orient Express,” “The Wedding Ringer,” and the critically acclaimed “Marshall.” In television, Gad played a fictionalized version of himself on FX’s “The Comedians” opposite Billy Crystal and currently stars in both Armando Lannuci’s HBO series “Avenue 5” and Apple’s hit animated series “Central Park,” which he co-created with “Bob’s
Burgers” Creator Loren Bouchard.