Documentary director Joshua Seftel returns to DN today with All the Empty Rooms. We first spoke to him in 2023 about Oscar-winning short Stranger at the Gate, a film that found its power in the personal rather than the political. In his latest, also Oscar-winning short, he has gone further still—stripping away commentary, debate, even dialogue—to capture something quieter and more devastating: the simple fact of a child’s absence, made visible through the objects they left behind. The film follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp across a seven-year journey into the empty bedrooms of children killed in American school shootings—a project Hartman pursued, tellingly, without his network’s knowledge. Shot on a small camera with a single zoom lens, never placing aesthetics above the time and trust of grieving families, All the Empty Rooms builds its visual language around an ethical position as much as a cinematic one. Cinematographer Matt Porwoll, whose credits span cartel territories and war zones, brought the same instinct here that he carries into conflict: react quickly, travel light, and never let the machinery of filmmaking interrupt what is actually happening. The camera stays at the edges of rooms, behind shoulders, observing rather than confronting—placing the viewer precisely where they would stand as that extra person in the doorway.
What Seftel discovered in the edit was that the film’s most powerful formal tension lives in the relationship between its handheld footage and Bopp’s still photographs. The deliberate contrast—a moving, breathing camera suddenly landing on something frozen—lends those images a weight they might not otherwise carry. With All the Empty Rooms available to watch on Netflix, and as we continue our 2026 Oscar nominee interview series, Seftel joins us to discuss the ethics of the camera in situations of grief, the architecture of silence, and what it means to make a film that asks its audience not to argue, but to remember.
Silence might be the sound of the brothers and sisters playing basketball outside the room in the driveway. That makes the room feel silent.
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