Recent MHS graduate Sam Schaefer is one of five speech students who star in the documentary film “Speak.”

Sam Schaefer

Nancy Edmonds Hanson 

The Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Five stars from movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The human rights award in the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
And one proud 2025 Moorhead High School graduate.
That’s Sam Schaefer and “Speak,” the documentary film that follows his dream of winning the world’s largest and most intense public speaking competition, the National Speech and Debate Association’s finals in 2024.
Sam, who received his MHS diploma last Friday, is one of five top high school oratory competitors profiled in “Speak,” an hour-long documentary film produced by Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman. He and his four co-stars – one from St. Paul, another from Fort Lauderdale, and two from Texas – were on hand in Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, in January, when the film premiered at the Sundance festival, the first of a year of stellar results in similar festivals around the country.
The young man from Moorhead was a natural for a documentary on the joys and challenges of competing in speech at the very highest level. “I’ve been involved in Moorhead theater since I was in ‘The Lion King Junior’ in the third grade,” Sam reports. “I was a hyena.”
That initial stage appearance connected. He has been involved in MHS productions since he auditioned for “Bonnie and Clyde” as a freshman. He has performed in every subsequent musical, playing the lead in this year’s “Big Fish.”
But early on, director Rebecca Meyer-Larson advised him, “We don’t offer acting lessons. Join speech.”
“So I did,” he goes on. “That first year, it went well. I was learning how it works. I felt a growing confidence that I could succeed.”
And he could. He started out in interpretive humor and drama, then switched to oratory at his teacher’s suggestion. That category of speech competition involves writing, memorizing, and delivering a persuasive speech on a topic of the speaker’s own choice, typically a social issue or problem, and then proposing a solution. The focus is on the effectiveness of the speech’s development, organization, and delivery.
The speech that earned him national honors in 2024 was about what he called “weaponized nostalgia.” He reflected on MAGA, “Make America Great Again.” “When was it so great, I asked,” he remembers. “That idea inherently excludes people of color, women and queer individuals. We need to ask ourselves, ‘Great for whom?’”
That original oration became the message the young man shares in “Speak.” But the road to the silver screen was a long one.
According to Wikipedia, the idea for “Speak” began five years ago as a TV proposal Then COVID intervened and it was shelved. “Speak” was revived in 2023 as a documentary that would capture “the euphoria of victory and the devastation of defeat as speech contestants craft and perform original oratories,” in the words of the film’s website. Sam was chosen to audition based on his qualification for the previous year’s national oratory finals.
“I did a first interview on Zoom,” he remembers. That brought him into an initial casting pool of 300 candidates, then again into the second of 300, then a third of 100, next in 60. By the time the pool had shrunk to the final 30, he says, he felt good about his chances of making the final corps of five. “I’ll be honest – I did expect to be chosen after the first one, but I knew there were so many being considered. As I made it though each one, I sensed I was jibing very well. They seemed to be attracted to my story and personality. We laughed a lot.”
The five high school speech contestants weren’t chosen to act, Sam explains, but as subjects whom the movie crew would follow as they prepared for the 2024 nationals. The film-makers interviewed each of them and filmed them where they lived and competed. During a first encounter with the five students at the NSDA finals in Phoenix in June 2023, the movie-makers shot footage that captured insights into the cast members’ personalities and challenges.
They spent a week in here in Moorhead that fall, interviewing Sam’s parents, Steve and Terese Schaefer, and sisters Rachel and Elly. They spent enough time to get a feel for the neighborhood, school and teachers who shaped Sam’s passion for public speaking. “They spent quite a bit of time interviewing me about how speech has impacted my life,” Sam remembers, “and what I wish it could to for others. They wanted to know what it’s like living here in such a hockey-centered town and state.”
He adds, “I probably said something like ‘it’s hard that speech isn’t recognized as much as hockey when we have such a great program and an astonishing record. At the time, we’d won seven state championships (now nine) … and not one parade.”
Finally the movie crew shot the documentary’s climactic footage at the 2024 nationals, held in Des Moines, Iowa, one year ago.
Six months later, the directors flew into Fargo-Moorhead to show the Schaefers and Meyer-Larson their finished film. “Terrifying!” Sam says of the experience. “It was so stressful that I ate an entire filet of smoked salmon. But it came out great. I think they captured everything perfectly.”
Now Sam is getting ready for freshman year at Concordia College, where his father works in international admissions. At this point, he plans to major in psychology and minor in journalism, communications or English. His ultimate goal is to go on to earn a master’s in the performing arts.
And so, to the point of the documentary “Speak”: How has his experience in competitive speech changed Sam’s life?
“Without taking part in speech, I’d be a 100% different person,” he reflects.
That’s the message “Speak” ultimately shares. “Speech has brought me very much out of my shell. I can communicate so much better,” Sam says. I’m much more confident in general. Without this experience and all that it’s taught me, I’d have very few friends. I’d be very reserved … and probably pretty sad.”