Keyword Debate Team

Dueling high school debate champs who are at odds on just about everything forge ahead with ambitious plans to get into the colleges of their dreams.

Justin Cobb, a teenager in suburban Oregon, copes with his thumb-sucking problem, romance, and his diagnosis with ADHD and subsequent experience using Ritalin.

A group of jaded high school students sign up for a debate class taught by a tough, combative teacher from the Georgia Military Academy who teaches them that life is debate and DEBATE IS WAR.

A girl goes to Harvard and joins the debate team. She has to deal with a ton of issues, from boyfriends, to ethnicity, to religion, to sexual assault.

A woman reminisces about her teenage years in the 1920s, when she fell in love with her teacher.

The fascinating complexity of high school debate gives way to a portrait of the equally complex racial and class bias of American education in Greg Whiteley's riveting documentary.

Five high school debate team students go on an overnight school trip at a hotel, chaperoned by their teacher. When love triangles, friendship quarrels, and secrets are revealed, the team begins to fall apart. In the heat of an argument, a bagel is thrown out of the hotel window and hits somebody on the street below. How will this band of misfits get away with their rule-breaking shenanigans?

Debate Team is a documentary exploring the weird subculture of competitive college debate. Competitors battle at 360 words per minute, hauling around mountains of evidence called "cards" and nearly every debate ends in global nuclear annihilation. In 2005, some 200 teams converged on San Francisco State to compete in the National Championship. The documentary follows four teams, from Michigan State, Harvard, West Georgia, and Berkeley in their quest for the national title. What emerges is not simply the chronicle of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but a more disturbing examination into the nature of competition itself and the American fetish with championships and champions.

Set in the cutthroat, boy-dominated world of high school debate where tomorrow’s leaders are groomed, GIRL TALK tells the timely story of five girls on a diverse, top-ranked Massachusetts high school debate team as they strive to become the best debaters in the United States on their own terms.