The Reel Review
With the epidemic of school shootings in America showing no signs of abating, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Joshua Seftel (Stranger at the Gate) follows CBS correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp during part of their seven-year journey documenting the empty bedrooms of children killed in gun violence, in this poignant documentary short.
There’s something particularly gut wrenching about seeing these kids’ empty bedrooms, time-capsule elegies filled with artifacts that serve as poignant reminders of lives taken way too soon. As hoped, Seftel, Hartman and Bopp handle the subject matter with the appropriate amount of sensitivity, as families describe this film as a way of honoring their dead children and shining a light onto the personal effects of school gun violence. After each visit, Hartman and Bopp create a picture book of each child’s empty bedroom and its contents as keepsakes for the families.
As expected, the film captures the unfulfilled potential and stolen futures of children taken too soon, but it also addresses the frustration about these tragedies being so frequent as to be quickly forgotten as soon as the next one takes place, often just a week or some even days later. All the Empty Rooms is a tearjerker that every American should see.
REEL FACTS
• All the Empty Rooms has been shortlisted for Oscar’s Best Documentary Short award category.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that gun violence remains the leading cause of death among American young people between the ages of 1 and 19.
• Director Joshua Seftel received his first Emmy nomination at the age of 22 with his 1992 documentary Lost and Found, about Romania’s orphaned children, which led to Americans adopting thousands of orphans. Seftel is the cousin of acclaimed children’s book author Judy Blume.
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