The epidemic of school shootings in America has no end in sight. There is this unspoken fear of turning on the news or receiving a social media alert that another act of violence has claimed more of our country’s youth. It hangs over this country like a perpetual, unforgiving cloud. We are all unbelievably familiar with the cycle: hearing the news, combing through the updates, fearing the perpetrator, and mourning those that we don’t even know. In Joshua Seftel’s unapologetic, uncompromising documentary short film, All the Empty Rooms, a triangle of journalists work together to give voices to those who can no longer speak. This is powerful filmmaking at its finest.
Seftel isn’t afraid of heady topics. His Oscar-nominated film Stranger at the Gate, looked hatred right in the face in the form of Mac McKinney, a former Marine who was determined to allow his prejudices give way to violence before a dramatic change. Empty Rooms centers on the families who have been left behind to cope after a loved one has died in a school shooting, and our gateway into this thread of storytelling comes through journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp.
Hartman has worked as a CBS News Correspondent since the mid-90s, but he noticed that the country as a whole began moving on from each school shooting faster and faster. We also see how reporting on these crimes and giving them all the weight they deserve has taken a toll on him mentally and emotionally.
We enter the homes of four families and get to know children through the words of their parents and the rooms that they used to thrive in. Bopp takes pictures of ordinary items left behind, but each snapshot tells us so much. There are packed hampers where the clothes are literally bursting out of the holes on the sides. Items under beds. Teddy bears and stuffed animals all over. Ribbons or awards on vanities and mirrors. Most of the rooms have been left completely untouched, and almost all of the parents reflect on not wanting to lose their child’s smell. I couldn’t help but think about the parents seeing a bedroom door held ajar at odd hours. Perhaps they go downstairs to feed a pet or turn off the lights, and they see light coming from a space that held laughter and excitement.
When you hold a photograph in your hand, you feel the memory rushing back to you. It’s something about the physical touch that elicits a response, and Seftel’s film explores how a physical space can become sacred. Maybe it always was? When we grow up in our childhood bedrooms, something is locked away in there forever–it almost becomes the foundation of the room itself. Seftel’s film is somber but never bleak. There is nothing to say when it comes to confronting such horror and violence, but hope is a powerful tool. There is a reason why many say that it flickers.
All the Empty Rooms is a testament to resilience in the wake of tremendous loss. At this moment, there may not be a more important film to sit with.
All the Empty Rooms is streaming now on Netflix.
