“All the Empty Rooms” is a 30-minute Netflix special featuring news reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp. The two friends spent seven years working together on the “empty room” project. It premiered at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival on August 31, 2025. Netflix then acquired the film and released it to streaming services on December 1, 2025. The goal of the short film was to bring awareness and expose a new side of the story of school shootings.
Previously, Hartman worked to find the good in situations and deliver heartfelt, warm news at the end of every week on the CBS evening show. Eventually, he got tired of this role and decided to make his own story, saying, “I’ve been typecast as the feel-good, happy news type of guy. What I’ve been doing is just whitewashing the whole thing.” Feeling lost and repetitive, Hartman knew he needed to find new sides to the stories, so he asked himself, “What could I do?”
Hartman and Bopp spent seven years interviewing parents of children who were victims of mass school shootings, taking pictures of the lost child’s room, and putting the story together. The Netflix special features only a few kids, all of them of different ages, but they visited many, many more houses on their mission. They spoke to mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and siblings of the victims. They built this story to raise awareness of the horrible tragedy that is increasingly common in America.
The 30-minute special is short but impactful. It shows a new side to school shootings that the majority of viewers have never seen. It has been described as “heartbreaking but necessary” by viewers. The rooms give viewers an insight into the devastating impact these tragedies have on families. It brings forth a new sense of empathy and heartbreak for those families who walk by those empty rooms every day. Many families have kept the room precisely the same to preserve the memory.
The question is raised: if one day the families move and the rooms get packed up, does the child’s memory get packed up or left behind? The way that the families have been impacted, they will always carry a piece of the lost child with them. The raw emotion captured in the pictures is truly devastating and reveals the individual pieces of who they were.
“I saw that America was moving on from each shooting quicker and quicker each time…Before this project, I was growing more and more numb to each school shooting, and I think America has been going through this process…Every time I hear about a school shooting, I know that room is out there.” Hartman commented. The film brings awareness to the impacts of mass shootings and gives viewers a new look that allows them to sympathize with the families. People who have watched the movie can look at these tragedies in a way they hadn’t been able to before.
