Oscar-Shortlisted ‘All The Empty Rooms’ Shows The Spaces Left Behind By School Shootings

Purple hair ties stretched over a door handle. SpongeBob plush toys arranged neatly on a bed. Unicorn figurines, a Champion brand hoodie, charm bracelets, seashells. These are some of the items left behind in the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings in the United States. A photo of the bedroom of Dominic Blackwell, a 14-year-old boy killed in a shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California in November 2019.Netflix Parents of these murdered children cannot bear to tamper with these possessions or these rooms, for reasons that require no explanation. The presence of these children, of the brief lives they lived and of their parents’ grief, come through in the Oscar-shortlisted documentary All the Empty Rooms , directed by Joshua Seftel . “For the parents, all of them agreed to participate because they live to tell the story of their children and they live to make sure their children are never forgotten,” Seftel said at a recent Q&A at Vista House in Los Angeles. “And so, our missions were aligned.” Watch on Deadline The project began with the work of CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, who has become renowned for heartfelt feature pieces. But while those lighter stories have made his reputation, a far darker subject has also consumed his attention - the growing number of children killed at school. “Steve Hartman was first assigned to report on a school shooting in 1997,” notes text on screen in the documentary. “Since he began, school shootings have increased from 17 to 132 per year.” All the Empty Rooms follows Hartman as he visits the homes of several children who fell victim to school shootings. At Hartman’s side is photographer Lou Bopp , who - at the invitation of parents - documents what he sees in those bedrooms. Sometimes it’s mundane details that capture the photographer’s eye. “A toothpaste tube in a child’s bathroom and the cap was left off,” Seftel cites by way of example. “A child who had rushed to school thinking, ‘I’ll put that on later,’ and never came home.” Bopp always removes his shoes before entering one of the bedrooms to photograph. “They trusted us,” Bopp said of the parents. “They let us in the rooms, and I did everything I could to treat it with the utmost respect and just taking off my shoes was part of it and not touching anything [in the rooms] was part of it.” Seftel says a sense of reverence guided the approach to the filmmaking. “The key was to keep it really simple. We wanted to [have a] very light footprint,” he said. “So, our crew was me and the cinematographer and then our producers, but often they would stay outside of the house. So, we would just be a few people. We never used prime lenses because we never wanted to have to stop and change a lens. We used zoom lenses. And they don’t always look as good, but I said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t...

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