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.
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.”
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
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.”
Photographer Lou Bopp in ‘All the Empty Rooms’
Netflix
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 want to be changing a lens in this moment and drawing attention to ourselves and what we’re doing and taking up their time for this production.’”
Seftel added, “The key was that we just tried to connect with the parents and listen to the stories that they were telling about their children and tried to use that as the guiding star.”
Netflix
All the Empty Rooms is streaming on Netflix. It won Best Documentary Short at the Cinema Eye Honors in New York last week, the latest in a string of awards that includes prizes at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, the Santa Fe Film Festival, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. Its impressive roster of executive producers incudes Lisa Cortés, Claire Aguilar, Sigrid Dyekjær, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Adam McKay, and Steve Kerr, head coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
Peter Albrechtsen serves as sound mixer. Erin Casper, Stephen Maing, and Jeremy Medoff edited the film. Matt Porwoll is DoP; Alex Somers composed the music. Somers and Seftel took care not to let the score overwhelm the film.
“The process was really interesting because [Alex] would give us these tracks and he would give us what’s called the ‘stems,’ which is the pieces of the track that add up to a track,” Seftel explained. “So, we had all the layers and every time he gave us something, we were like, ‘I think it could be less than this.’ And we just kept subtracting and subtracting and subtracting until there was just the most minimal pieces in there and it just worked better every time we thinned it and culled it down… It’s like it drew less attention. We never wanted people to feel like they were being told what to feel, because as soon as that happens it’s over, I think, for a film like this.”
For similar reasons, Seftel keeps politics outside the frame – those extremely fractious debates over gun rights and gun protections that can render young victims of shootings an afterthought.
Director Joshua Seftel speaks at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival on October 31, 2025 in Savannah, Georgia.
Derek White/Getty Images for SCAD
“The word ‘gun’ is never said in this film,” Seftel noted. “So, it’s a film about gun violence that never says the word gun… It was a process to get there. Initially, we thought we have to acknowledge the debate, the political debate. And we even had a sequence where you could hear people debating the different sides and if there are sides in this — which I don’t think there really are. And then over time, as the film started to take shape and come together, we realized that we didn’t need that. I didn’t want there to be anything in this film that would give a person a reason to turn it off.”
The filmmaker continued, “We just felt like there is no debate around this. Everyone agrees that you send your kid to school, they should be safe. And that’s simple. There’s no argument. Everyone agrees with that. And if we can just get back to that idea and remember that these are real lives and they’re real people, they’re not statistics, it’s not just a headline, but there’s an empty bedroom, that maybe that’s a bit of a reset, and that’s our hope.”