The documentary “All of the Empty Rooms,” which memorialized youngsters killed at school shootings by a take a look at the bedrooms they by no means returned to, took house 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 instructed the group earlier than passing the mic to Cazares.
Carrying a purple 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 mild and our life. Gun violence is now the primary reason behind demise in children and teenagers. We consider that if the world might see their empty bedrooms, we would be a distinct America.”
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Instances through Getty Photographs 
When Hartman traveled to Uvalde, Texas, the place a gunman killed 19 youngsters and two academics at Robb Elementary Faculty, Cazares instructed him that individuals are all the time telling her that they can not think about what she’s going by. However she stated we have to think about, and that is why she invited Hartman and Bopp into her house.
“It simply makes every little thing extra actual for the general public, for the world,” Carazes stated on the time. “Her room utterly 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 nearly untouched, years after the shootings.
“Their personalities shone by 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 in regards to the challenge in 2024.
Click on right here to discover the interactive characteristic
Extra from CBS “Sunday Morning”:
Standing on the brink of grief, documenting the bedrooms of youngsters killed at school shootings
