“All the Empty Rooms” wins Oscar for Steve Hartman’s project memorializing children killed in school shootings – Fast Blogs World

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

The movie follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp alongside their seven-year journey to doc the toll of America’s faculty capturing 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 school shooting in 2022.

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

Carrying a crimson gown 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 mentioned. “Jackie is greater than only a headline. She is our mild and our life. Gun violence is now the primary reason behind dying in children and teenagers. We imagine that if the world might see their empty bedrooms, we’d be a distinct America.”

When Hartman traveled to Uvalde, Texas, the place a gunman killed 19 youngsters and two academics at Robb Elementary Faculty, Cazares informed him that individuals are at all times telling her that they will’t think about what she’s going by way of. However she mentioned we have to think about, and that’s why she invited Hartman and Bopp into her dwelling.

“It simply makes every part extra actual for the general public, for the world,” Carazes said at 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 wished 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 by way of within the smallest particulars of their untouched rooms — hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a college occasion — permitting me to uncover glimpses as to who they had been,” Bopp said in an essay concerning the venture in 2024.

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Extra from CBS “Sunday Morning”:
Standing on the threshold of grief, documenting the bedrooms of kids killed in school shootings