Directed by Joshua Setfel, “All the Empty Rooms” follows former Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) correspondent Steve Hartman and acclaimed photographer Lou Bopp. Disillusioned by the media’s focus on violence, the duo wondered how they could try to shift the narrative away from the perpetrators and toward the victims of school shootings. In light of this, they began filming a docu-short film, “All the Empty Rooms,” spending years visiting the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. While the somberness and depressive nature of the film, especially the unique grief the families experience, make the topic uncomfortable, the pair believed that the feature could serve as a powerful, non-political tribute that aims to raise awareness of these increasingly common tragedies.
“I think it’s very eye-opening, because people often focus on the shooters more than the victims. The victims should be spoken about more for awareness, and their families deserve for their children’s stories to be heard. Of course, gun control is important, but somehow along the way, people got so caught up in regulations that they forgot what mattered. This documentary was very refreshing to see, and I’d recommend it to any and everyone because it’s a short watch and made many great points,” sophomore Emma Woods said.
With a 92% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes, critics described the film as conveying a difficult but powerful message, one that promotes empathy and understanding rather than simple derogatory rhetoric. Hartman and Bopp aimed to portray the “sustained ache” that the families of victims typically experience, including the quiet, intimate and intolerable pain that persists years after news outlets move on. For these types of crimes, the families typically see the child’s bedroom as a representation of when they last saw their loved one. By preserving the room, they can maintain a physical connection to their lost child, making the bedroom a living memorial rather than an empty shell.
Stefel stated that the apolitical approach of the film aims to solely focus on the lives of the deceased children and their grieving families, rather than the disputed issue of gun control that frequently overwhelms these stories. Through the films’ 33-minute duration, the families and interviewers do not mention the method in which these children died, notably excluding words such as “gun,” “shooter” or “school shooting.” Stefel deliberately chose to set aside the political aspect of this issue and focus on the innate human experience of losing a child.
“People’s solutions might be different, and we often might think they’re radical, but they want the same thing. It’s just how they get there that might appear different and this film brings that raw reality to everybody because we can all think about our kids or kids in our lives and what those empty rooms are like — the smells and what it would be like and how we probably wouldn’t want ever to touch that empty room. This film shines from that vantage point through an apolitical lens in a way that’s extremely powerful. We’ve had people on both sides of the spectrum watch this film and really shift the way that they think about this because of it,” National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded firearm injury prevention researcher Chethan Sathya said.
The film avoids sensationalism, with the narrative lingering on the personal items of each child featured in the film, and it uses them to tell the victims’ life story, rather than focusing on their death. “All the Empty Rooms” acts as a visual representation of silent absence, highlighting the everyday details — toys on the floor, the messy bed, a dry toothbrush — left in these vacant spaces. The film shifts the narrative from immediate headlines to the tragic lives of broken families. The movie also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards, crediting its ability to portray the issue of school shootings as “harder to look away from.” The film aims to confront the deeply personal, permanent and daily realities of the victims’ families, removing the idea of school shootings as isolated situations.
School shootings represent a societal problem beyond the immediate acts of violence by highlighting the tendency to shift away from difficult topics. While the event itself devastates the community as a whole, the media’s focus on high-publicity topics repeatedly attracts surges in political debate and controversy over gun control policies. “All the Empty Rooms” powerfully showcases the tragedy of school shootings at their core — the loss of innocent lives in senseless acts of violence and the profound, lasting grief of families forced to navigate the world without their child.
