Candace Hammer

Hal is a 15-year-old high-school student with a minor yet socially alienating (and painful) disability: he stutters uncontrollably. Determined to work through the problem, Hal opts for an extreme route – he joins the school debating team, which sends him on a headfirst plunge into breakneck speech competitions and offers a much-needed boost toward correcting the problem.

When the citizens of a small evangelical town systematically begin committing suicide, a young girl struggling to reconcile her Christian upbringing with her desire to experience the outside world finds her faith put to the ultimate test.

The Forbidden Zone is a stop-motion short film about Dumont, a botanist, who has quarantined in an abandoned train station. The world has become saturated by a toxic fog that destroys all life forms and replaces oxygen with poison. He spends his days fighting to survive, as his resources quickly dwindle. On a night when all seems lost, a nymph crashes outside Dumont’s bunker. In a sudden act of bravery, he dons his final tank of oxygen and leaves the safety of the station. Gathering the wounded Nymph in his arms, Dumont risks his life to return the glowing creature to the peak of the red mountain. In his quest to save his new charge, Dumont risks his life and, in doing so, discovers hope beyond the fog.