All The Empty Rooms

Bluesky

Every year, hundreds of short films compete for a chance to make it to the Oscars. With so many to consider, it’s difficult to judge on quality alone. Particularly in the documentary section, the perceived importance of subject matter also plays a role. It’s notable, then, that one subject crops up almost every year: US school shootings.

Steve Hartman used to be the cheerful guy brought on at the end of the news, in his work with CBS. As he puts it here, it was his job to persuade people, after everything they’d seen, that actually life is okay. The more he saw of school shootings, the less her felt capable of doing that. Now he’s partnering with photographer Lou Bopp in a project focused on the rooms that the victims left behind. It’s a way of commemorating who those children were and putting them front and centre in the national conversation, rather than contributing to the process of rewarding their killers with fame.

It has been a long time since some of the children died. The parents we encounter have tried to keep their rooms just as they were, to hold on to the smell of them, to experience all that they left behind as fully as they can before it’s gone. They talk a little about their memories, share photographs and video clips. Sometimes a sibling joins in. For the most part, though, the rooms speak for themselves.

Here are soft toys and posters, sports gear and stationary, clothing, drawings and more. In one boy’s room, a jar of pens and pencils; each one would have had its own particular purpose and history which only he knew. Across the pillows on his bed sits a row of Spongebobs, their different personalities now a mystery. In a girl’s room we see strings of carefully threaded beads. Why did she choose those colour combinations? How did she imagine herself when she wore them? Another girl left behind a treasured sports helmet with signatures on it. We know what she thought about all sorts of things because she never shut up, but as a consequence, the silence in her absence is overwhelming.

All of these things give meaning to a name on a list. 420 children were shot dead in US schools in 2025. Every year the number of incidents gets higher. It’s impossible for any individual to keep track of them all, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t honour who they were, or that we can afford to forget what the loss of any one of them meant. Of course, we don’t meet parents who declined Hartman’s request in this film, but those we do meet stress its importance to them both on a personal level and as a means of doing something. They believe that it’s only when the country at large truly understands the human toll that change will come.

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