Oscar-nominated film documents the lives lost to school shootings through their empty bedrooms

The short documentary All The Empty Rooms follows CBS news correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on their years-long journey memorializing the empty rooms of victims of school shootings.

The film features four families from Santa Clarita, California; Uvalde, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee.

Director Joshua Seftel said he received a call from Hartman three years ago asking if the photography project could be turned into a documentary film. Hartman showed Seftel a photo of an opened toothpaste tube from the bathroom of a school shooting victim.

“You could see the story,” Seftel said. “You could imagine the kid rushing to school in the morning, not taking the time to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube, thinking 'I'll put that on when I get home.' And then the child never came home from school and I immediately just thought this approach — talking about school shootings through these photographs of the empty bedrooms — was just really novel and powerful.”

All the Empty Rooms is now nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2026 Academy Awards and is available to watch on Netflix.

LAist All Things Considered host Julia Paskin talked with Seftel and Mia Tretta — a school shooting survivor and friend of one of the victims featured in the film.

A sensitive filmmaking process

During the filmmaking process, Seftel said he wanted to be as respectful of the families as possible by entering the rooms with small crews and using minimal equipment. He said many of the rooms were “frozen in time” and left untouched by parents since the day their children died.

Julia Paskin:  Did you learn anything about how to go about documenting stories in a way that is respectful to your subjects?

Joshua Seftel: I would say that a lot of the coverage on school shootings and mass shootings in general, especially early on, focused on the shooter and talked about them a lot. And the victims often were in the background and often faded away from the news coverage.

So you end up with the victims being forgotten, and these families that we visited in All The Empty Rooms all feel that way. They feel like however long it had been since their child had been killed in a school shooting, they felt like the world had moved on and left them behind.

And for them to be able to get to tell the story of their child is everything… In the process of making this film, we've wanted to shine a light on the people who are gone, the kids who are gone. And in the process of telling the story, we made a film that never mentions the word "gun."

That was by choice because we wanted to make a film that was about the children who were gone, and we wanted to make a film that never gave the viewer a reason to turn it off.

And sadly, in the world we live in, even just saying the word "gun" is polarizing and could possibly get people to turn off. And we want to make sure people watch to the end and know the stories of these children because we think the stories of these children in these empty rooms have the potential to make people feel something again.

On the importance of silence in the film

Julia Paskin:  You insisted on Steve Hartman being a character. Folks that are familiar with him on CBS know he does a lot of "feel good" stories. And this is a departure because this story, as he points out, deserves that treatment. Why was that important to include in the storytelling?

Joshua Seftel: For those people who watch Steve Hartman on CBS and see him on CBS Sunday morning almost every week, he's there to sort of say the perfect thing.

And in this film, when we followed Steve into these bedrooms and into these homes, oftentimes there's not much to say. It's about the silence of these places. It's about the absence of the child.

These rooms are empty. And what we found is that Steve didn't have the perfect thing to say because in some cases there's really nothing to say. What's happening in our country with gun violence and with school shootings where there are now more than 100 a year is completely unacceptable. And we all know that deep down.

And by showing these bedrooms and showing the empty spaces and the children who are gone, there's not much more you need to say than to just see these rooms. And that's what we wanted to capture in the film.

‘Losing my best friend’

Tretta was best friends with Dominic Blackwell, one of the victims in the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, where she was also shot. Tretta also experienced another school shooting last December.

“ I lost my best friend and I went across the country to go to college. And six years later I found myself in lockdown for over 10 hours at the Brown University shooting,” she said.

Tretta met Blackwell on the first day of 8th grade after having transferred to a new school.

Tretta: I walked into my math class … and he was sitting in the back of the class with his feet on the desk and a bright SpongeBob shirt and introduced himself as Dominic Michael Jordan Blackwell. And from that day on, we became best friends.

Pretty much from that first day of eighth grade, we were inseparable… until one random day in November. A boy we didn't know pulled a .45 caliber ghost gun out of his backpack. And because of gun violence, Dominic is gone. And it was in that same shooting that I was shot in the stomach.

And I feel like even though the pain of getting shot is terrible physically and mentally and something that I'm still having to deal with on an almost daily basis, nothing compares to the pain that I felt losing Dominic and losing my best friend and having to cope with that at the same time as everything else.

So I think the movie does a really beautiful job of not only showing the fact that gun violence stole such a beautiful person from everyone's lives, but also portraying him as the type of person he was.

This interview has been edited for clarity.