All the Empty Rooms was a hard film to watch. But the film had to be made, and we are spiritually bound to watch this memorial.
All the Empty Rooms
All the Empty Rooms is a 2025 American documentary short film that was directed and produced by Joshua Seftel. The film follows Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they travel across the United States to enter and memorialize the bedrooms of children who were killed in school shootings. It was released on Netflix on December 1, 2025.
CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman has been reporting on school shootings in the United States since 1997. It’s one thing to report the mass slaughtering of our children, but it seems to only become a temporary blip in the news before the next disaster is reported. We don’t know the children. We don’t know what their dreams were or what was important to them. They are only a blip in the news…forgotten quickly by the next day. The mouthpieces of the NRA and the government point fingers at everything…except their own failure to protect the most valuable resources on the planet…our children.
Steve Hartman and Lou Bopp bring the children back to life, if only briefly, by visiting eight families over seven years. Steve chose children from five different school shootings. Steve spoke with the families of the assassinated children (you will notice that I am choosing the correct term for what happened to these babies…assassinated), and Lou took thousands of photos of the children’s rooms.
Many of the parents have left their children’s rooms as they were. SpongeBob Square Pants was important to 14-year-old Dominic Blackwell, one of two teens killed in a 2019 shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. The parents have not washed the clothing filled with Dominic’s clothes because they don’t want to lose his smell.
The parents of Hallie Scruggs, a 9-year-old girl killed in the 2023 Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn, have also preserved her essence in the child’s untouched room, as have the family of 9- year-old Jackie Cazares, one of 19 children and two teachers killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Luckily for her parents, they can hear her voice from a recorder inside stuffed animals on her bed.
Gracie Muehlberger was only fifteen and planning to go to a school dance. The dress that she was so excited to wear at the dance…is still hanging in her room.
Conclusion
Every single day, we hear of a death caused by guns. Every…single…day. Hey, I lived in South Philly. Philadelphia is a beautiful city, but people have gotten shot for taking someone’s parking space. South Philly is also known for several mob shootings. Unfortunately, the News Stations rushing to bring us the next big scandal have reduced the mass school shootings to a blurb on the screen. We do not know the children who were stolen from us. We do not know what their dreams and aspirations were. These youngsters were reduced to nothing more than breaking news.
All the Empty Rooms will be extremely hard for you to watch. It was for me. Joshua Seftel, Steve Hartman, and Lou Bopp have made a documentary that honours the memory of children killed in a school shooting. They are no longer a blurb on the news. They have a face, a voice, a favourite hoodie, or a dream of going to a school dance. This documentary allows us to sit with the grieving parents and hold space for their babies.
