Ömer Sami On Discovering a Coming-of-Age Tale in a Police Boot Camp for Doc Short ‘Into the Blue’

Existing as a teenager is difficult enough. Your body is changing, and you feel like everyone is in your business. Most of us wish we could escape adolescence unseen and unscathed and transition immediately into adulthood. In Ömer Sami’s poignant and deeply felt documentary short, Into the Blue, we stumble on a coming-of-age so special and and personal that we cannot look away.

In Copenhagen, a group of twelve to fourteen year-olds are invited to participate in a week-long boot camp with the Copenhagen Police. They simulate drills and exercises but details are withheld, and the film has a constant spontaneity to it. Sami discovered these practices almost accidentally, but he latched onto his subject quite quickly.

“I was researching a completely different film, and someone I cast dropped out at the last minute,” Sami says. “Since it was a film school project, we had to shoot it in a specific week. Over the summer holidays, I was doom scrolling, and I saw a Twitter post from the Copenhagen Police about this program. I was surprised, because this program is not known at all. Now that I have shown it to people, they do. From then, I began wondering who was taking part in this, and why a girl from this specific area of Copenhagen would want to try it out. When I began talking to the police, I showed them my earlier work which is a film about a young boy’s coming-of-age, and I think they trusted me with it.

I was able to come to the classrooms and meet the girls, and that’s when I met Tatheer. I knew I wanted to meet a character who was an observer and was introverted. I could tell that she had a very vivid inner life, and I suspected that she might be a bit overlooked. In these teenage dynamics, it’s usually the person who shouts the loudest who gets the most attention and respect. When I did the preliminary interviews with some of the girls to find out why they wanted to take part, she told me that she liked driving in fast cars. I thought that that was surprising and very honest.”

The moon seems to be watching over these young girls and the night sky creates an almost comforting atmosphere. Sami introduces a dark color palette in a beautifully organic way. In America, associate the dark navy colors with law enforcement officials and the director subtly transmits that into our subconscious. There are some transitions that highlight the color blue and the images swirl around and change until we realize that we are looking at, perhaps, Tatheer’s inner thoughts.

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted some mental space to convey thoughts,” he says. “I wanted to find out how to create a space that belonged to her and to differentiate it from this hectic, hormone-fueled environment that she is thrusted into. The seed was planted when she mentioned her passion for driving. I saw her face light up, so I thought about the car being a space where her imagination could truly flow. From there, it’s been interesting to see how different interpret it. Some people thought it recalled her own experiences with the police. I guess we project whatever we want onto it, and I wanted to find a title that had a movement.”

Tatheer begins her time at the camp in a tentative place, and Sami and I talked about the role of a director while observing his subject. The activities these young women find themselves in automatically gives them authority over their peers. Into the Blue silently asks the viewer what we would do with that power? Does power and authority lend itself to always do the right thing?

“I saw this boot camp as an opportunity as the values that the police want to give these chances to the girls to play cop,” Sami says. “What would they enact? When they play as an officer, what preconceived notions do they have about how they are supposed to act? You’re kind of seeing how the police want to come across and how the girls see them. I could sense that Tatheer was one of the girls who had some of the more challenging experiences of the week. Some of the older girls, I think, viewed it as a summer camp. They were in their element the entire time. Tatheer was pushed out of her element socially with these procedures.”

The most intense moment of the film is when the girls are hooded with their hands zip-tied together. They don’t know where they are going as they zoom along in a small van, and Sami takes the opportunity to bring the camera closer to their faces. We can hear their breathing and, for a moment, we think we can heard her pulse quickening before being escorted to the end of a dock. Tatheer breaks down in front of her fellow campers, and we realize that even though the simulations are fake, the emotions are very real.

“That was actually a mistake,” Sami admits. “She was supposed to be dipped into the water by the person who was standing there, but, for some reason, he didn’t get there in time and she fell in. That was the moment that I felt very uncomfortable viewing this. It felt like the line had been crossed, and I was convinced that I wouldn’t put it in the final cut. When we back to the camp, I could tell, though, that something had changed. She was getting some more attention from the group, and it felt like something was lit within her. I wanted to include that tipping point for her, and, after that, she was filming rap videos on her phone and you could get a sense that she was coming more into herself. When I showed her the finished film, she felt proud that she overcame that.”

The agreement with the police was that we didn’t know what was going to happen either. The only thing that we promised was that we didn’t get in the way. My instinct was to step in during that moment, but I knew someone else was taking responsibility. I shared that astonishment with the audience.”