One of the Oscar winners has an emotional connection to South Florida.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the Empty Rooms\u201d won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. It explores the pain of families who lost children in school shootings, and it does so by taking viewers into the bedrooms of those kids.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been working with them since 2018, so for all this to come together, the documentary, and for them to win an Oscar, is incredible,\u201d said Broward School Board member Lori Alhadeff.<\/p>\n
Her daughter, Alyssa, was among the 17 murdered in the Parkland tragedy, and Alyssa\u2019s room is shown in the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAlyssa\u2019s soccer bag, her MSD soccer bag,\u201d Alhadeff said, showing us Alyssa\u2019s everyday things.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She kept it all, from her cellphone to her lip gloss to school supplies. Every mundane item packs an emotional punch. That\u2019s the premise of \u201cAll the Empty Rooms.\u201d Journalist Steve Hartman spent seven years traveling the country, documenting the empty bedrooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is in the documentary, this is a picture of Alyssa and her best friend, Abby,\u201d Alhadeff said, showing us a picture from a photo book given to her by the film\u2019s producers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Alhadeff, the Netflix film is a gut punch, but it\u2019s also a chance to re-engage the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe documentary helps to continue the conversation. Unfortunately, we only tend to talk about school shootings after the last tragedy. I want people to be more proactive about school safety,\u201d Alhadeff said. \u201cYou know, I go around the country speaking about school safety, and a lot of people live in the bubble. I lived in the Parkland bubble; I never thought this tragedy would happen here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The film, Alhadeff says, reinforces the need to protect the reforms Florida signed into law in the aftermath of the MSD High School Massacre in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have saved lives through the red flag laws, and having a guardian or SRO at every school, and we need to keep the age to purchase guns, keep it at 21 years old, it\u2019s working, it\u2019s saving lives, and it\u2019s helping to protect our communities and our schools,\u201d Alhadeff said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In her own home, Alyssa\u2019s room is now her brother\u2019s room, and Alhadeff has the same thought every time she walks in there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat Alyssa should still be here, it\u2019s very painful that she\u2019s not,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alhadeff became a school board member to focus on school security, and she runs her own nonprofit organization called \u201cMake Our Schools Safe.\u201d When she retires from the school board this year, she will devote all of her time to her school safety efforts, all to honor the memory and legacy of her daughter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the Oscar winners has an emotional connection to South Florida.\u00a0 \u201cAll the Empty Rooms\u201d won the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2624,93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-349944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-academy-awards","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}