WASHINGTON — Parents of children killed in school shootings across the United States have shared stories about the empty bedrooms left behind by their sons and daughters, featured in the Oscar-winning documentary short “All the Empty Rooms,” CBS News reported.
The film, directed by Joshua Seftel with correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp, documents the untouched rooms of children lost in multiple school shootings. It highlights how families preserve these spaces as they were on the day of the tragedies, capturing personal items that reflect the children’s lives.
The project spanned several years, with families from at least five different school shootings, including Uvalde, Texas, allowing access to the bedrooms. One featured room belonged to Jackie Cazares, 9, killed in the 2022 Uvalde shooting. Her mother, Gloria Cazares, described the space as frozen in time.
“Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Gloria Cazares said. “Jackie is more than a headline. She is our light and our life.”
The documentary, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in March 2026, presents the rooms through photography and interviews, showing details such as unmade beds, personal belongings and items left exactly as the children left them. Families from incidents including Sandy Hook and others participated.
Parents involved in the project have spoken about the difficulty of entering the rooms and the decision to keep them unchanged as a way to hold onto memories. The film aims to humanize the statistics on school shootings by focusing on the individual children and the ongoing grief of their families.
Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, more than 170 children have been killed in school shootings in the U.S., according to CBS News tracking. The documentary does not focus on policy debates but on the personal experiences of loss.
Additional families have shared similar accounts in media coverage tied to the film’s release and awards. Details about specific new stories emerging on or around June 15, 2026, were not immediately available.
As of Monday, the documentary remains available on Netflix, and the families continue to advocate for remembrance of their children through these preserved spaces. Further interviews or expansions of the project have not been detailed in recent reports.
