All The Empty Short Film

On man, this is going to be a hard one, and I planned to do five novels you can use as an advent novel. The idea is to open a chapter every day and read it, and by the 25th, you’ll have read a whole book. Books have nothing to do with this post, but I wanted to show you, as the writer, how wide the human thought process can be. In a way, I’m trying to soften the blow of my views as a viewer of this short film. I’m talking about  All the Empty Rooms, which was recently added to Netflix.

 All the Empty Rooms starts with a reporter, Steve Hartman, whose stories are typically the feel-good stories to end on a good note. He decided to call his friend documentarian Joshua Seftel. With the words, I’m doing a story about the empty bedrooms of children who’ve been killed in school shootings, and I wonder if there might be a documentary film in all of this.” This was the birth of this project. Something that touched me was Joshua Seftel, who has a morning routine with his daughter to capture a daily photo, while in a few minutes he will go to families who can’t do that with theirs.

They all lost their kids to the hands of a school shooter, someone they had never seen before, who will be the last one they will ever see in this world or worse, a classmate with whom they shared emotions and thoughts. We view the stories of children who left the physical world way too soon, in a place where they should have been safe, in a place where they should have been guided to their dreams. In the end, each family is given a photo album, with the bedroom of their child left in a timeless state to tell the story. In an article which came out last month, there were 159 school shootings in the USA alone.