The documentary 'All the Empty Rooms,' which chronicles the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, won the Best Documentary Short Oscar at the 98th Academy Awards. The film, directed by Joshua Seftel and featuring CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, highlights the impact of gun violence through the personal stories of the victims' families.
'All the Empty Rooms,' which memorialized children killed in school shootings through a look at the bedrooms they never returned to, took home the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.
The film follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they documented the toll of America's school shooting epidemic. Director Joshua Seftel accepted the Oscar on stage alongside Hartman, producer Conall Jones and Gloria Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was killed in the 2022 Uvalde school shooting.'The four empty rooms in our film belonged to four young children who were all killed in school shootings: Hallie, Gracie, Dominic and Jackie,' Seftel told the crowd before passing the mic to Cazares.Wearing a red dress and a pin with an image of Jackie, Cazares spoke of her 9-year-old daughter and appealed for an end to gun violence.'Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,' Cazares said. 'Jackie is more than just a headline. She is our light and our life. Gun violence is now the number one cause of death in kids and teens. We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we'd be a different America.'Seftel told reporters that Hartman called him the morning after the 2023 Oscars to tell him about his project of photographing the rooms of children killed in school shootings. He asked Seftel whether he thought the project might be a documentary.'My immediate reaction was yes,' Seftel said. 'And his immediate reaction was, 'OK, good, well I don't want to be in the film.''Ultimately, Hartman agreed to be featured in the film. Seftel called Hartman 'the perfect messenger' for this story and said he wanted to make the documentary because Hartman was 'going to be our tour guide and take us to these rooms.''He's someone that people trust,' Seftel said. 'He's not political. He's just someone who cares about people, and for this message to be delivered, it needed to come from someone like that, someone who people are going to listen to and not shut off.'Hartman traveled to visit eight families who lost their children to gun violence over the span of several years, including the four featured in the documentary. The children's rooms remained virtually untouched, years after the shootings. Bopp, who photographed all of the rooms, said he sought to make 'a portrait of a child who isn't there.' He recalled in an essay for CBS News: 'Their personalities shone through in the smallest details of their untouched rooms — hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a school event — allowing me to uncover glimpses as to who they were.'Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, a longtime advocate for stronger gun laws, signed on as an executive producer to help promote the film, though he was not involved in making it.'What mattered to me right away was how the film listens to families,' Kerr wrote in a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. 'It gives them room to speak about their children without exploiting their stories into politics or spectacle. There's a dignity in that choice, which is difficult to find in the way our country usually talks about gun violence.''The parents are not asking to be symbols,' he wrote. 'They're talking about their children, about love, about absence, about time standing still. If we really allow ourselves to feel what these families are living with, we might finally be ready to do something about it.'CBSNews.com published an interactive to allow viewers to step into the children's rooms, just as they left them. Click here to explore the interactive feature.
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