“All of the Empty Rooms” wins Oscar for Steve Hartman’s venture memorializing youngsters killed at school shootings

The documentary “All of the Empty Rooms,” which memorialized youngsters killed at school shootings via a take a look at the bedrooms they by no means returned to, took residence the Oscar for Finest Documentary Quick on the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.

The movie follows CBS Information correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp alongside their seven-year journey to doc the toll of America’s faculty taking pictures epidemic. Director Joshua Seftel accepted the Oscar on stage alongside Hartman, producer Conall Jones and Gloria Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was killed within the Uvalde faculty taking pictures in 2022.

“The 4 empty rooms in our movie belonged to 4 younger youngsters who had been all killed at school shootings: Hallie, Gracie, Dominic and Jackie,” Seftel advised the gang earlier than passing the mic to Cazares.

Carrying crimson costume and a pin with a picture of Jackie, Cazares spoke of her 9-year-old daughter and appealed for an finish to gun violence.

“Since that day, her bed room has been frozen in time,” Cazares stated. “Jackie is greater than only a headline. She is our gentle and our life. Gun violence is now the primary reason behind loss of life in youngsters and youths. We imagine that if the world may see their empty bedrooms, we would be a special America.”

When Hartman traveled to Uvalde, Texas, the place a gunman killed 19 youngsters and two lecturers at Robb Elementary Faculty, Cazares advised him that individuals are at all times telling her that they can not think about what she’s going via. However she stated we have to think about, and that is why she invited Hartman and Bopp into her residence.

“It simply makes every part extra actual for the general public, for the world,” Carazes stated on the time. “Her room fully simply speaks of who she was.”

In Jackie’s room, there was the chocolate she had saved for a day that by no means got here, and an “About Me” chalkboard the place she wrote that she needed to be a veterinarian when she grew up.

Most of the youngsters’s rooms, like Jackie’s, remained just about untouched, years after the shootings. 

“Their personalities shone via within the smallest particulars of their untouched rooms — hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a faculty occasion — permitting me to uncover glimpses as to who they had been,” Bopp stated in an essay concerning the venture in 2024.