A Carmel Valley film producer heads to the Oscars for a short documentary.

Conall Jones’ work days are busy with calls, Slack, texts, Zoom meetings. As a documentary film producer, there is always something to do – schedule interviews, view footage, coordinate logistics. He occupies the same frenetic world as we all do, with multiple screens competing for his attention all the time. Still, he says, “I do believe in the power of cinema to transport people.”

That makes a film all about absence all the more stirring. There is a weight of vacancy in All the Empty Rooms, a slow-moving, 34-minute documentary. The film, directed by Joshua Seftel, follows CBS correspondent Steve Hartman on a project around the country as he documents the empty bedrooms of children who were killed in school shootings. Hartman is grappling with his own numbness after covering too much violence. Each child dead is not a statistic, he knows – but in visiting surviving parents and siblings in the intimacy of their homes, and the intimacy of their late children’s bedrooms, Hartman really knows. And this knowing is what Hartman, and by extension Seftel and Jones, hope to share with viewers. “I wish we could transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes,” Hartman says in the film. “We’d be a different America.”

Jones, speaking from his home in Carmel Valley, says this is the goal of the film: to transport us all to these bedrooms, “so people can feel what it’s like to be there and that these kids were real, they are not a statistic.” It is atmospheric, with the sounds of creaking floors sometimes taking up space instead of dialogue. Through close-ups of the details of mundane acts of living – a toothpaste cap left unscrewed, a laundry basket still full five years later, a shoebox under the bed – we join these parents in their unspeakable grief in the wake of entirely preventable loss. As the media and the public move on from each shooting, half expecting the next, they endure the daily emptiness of their loss.

In Uvalde, Texas, Javier Cazares keeps a chair next to his daughter Jackie Cazares’ bed. “It brings me some comfort just to go in there, just to chat sometimes,” he tells the camera.

Jackie was 9 when she was murdered in a mass shooting at her elementary school.

In Santa Clarita, Cindy and Bryan Muehlberger keep their 15-year-old daughter Gracie Muehlberger’s clothes, selected to wear on Friday, on the hanger. She was killed on a Thursday at Saugus High School in 2019.

Gracie was a natural performer, and she aspired to be in an Oscar-nominated film someday, Jones says. All the Empty Rooms is one of five nominees for Best Documentary Short at the Academy Awards (to be announced Sunday, March 15), “and now she is, for all the wrong reasons,” Jones says.

When the families and film crew joined a video call early one morning in January and heard they’d been nominated, Jones says the Muehlbergers wept. Jones has seen the film hundreds of times and says he cries on every watch, but quickly says it’s not about him – it is about the grieving families. But Jones is also a parent of a 1-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter and he, too, is changed.

“I have a more profound gratitude for my kids and my life,” he says. “I have been trying to keep my daughter away from even knowing what this film is about, because I don’t want her to even think about it.”

After growing up in Carmel Valley, Jones found documentary film by way of San Francisco, LA, Korea and New York, before returning in 2021. This is his second Oscar nomination and yes, he will be wearing a tux for the big night. “It’s strange being part of the glitz and glamor,” he says. “There’s a little part of me that thinks it’s fun, but thankfully we are bringing the families with us and that helps ground us in not getting too caught up in the celebrity of it all, which is a temptation.”

The film truly settles into the humanness of who these children were and how they are frozen in time for their grieving families. There is no discussion of politics or policy remedies. That was partly to ensure Netflix would buy All The Empty Rooms and not to alienate prospective viewers, but also to make sure that it’s about what it is supposed to be about: real people enduring preventable and heartbreaking grief.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com