When you’re with them day in, day out, you see how their wiring has been so fucked with on so many levels.” “They are the marginalised of the marginalised,” notes Oppenheimer, “forgotten by everyone. Many have a string of drug and sex-work-related convictions. Most are disenfranchised by the state, church, school and family, the hard details of which they share to camera.
They are known and feared in the economically deprived Ward 8 district for carrying ice-picks in their clutch-bags. In Check It, a familiarly cinematic gay narrative of victimhood and bullying is wrestled back by the gang, an elastic cooperative of whip-smart 14-22-year-olds who spring to one another’s defence at the ping of a WhatsApp alert. There are countless organisations that are funding programmes across the world while failing to see what is directly under our noses.” “It is so shameful to me,” she says, “that this could go on in a city that is very wealthy and well educated. Some of the Check It go to the same public school as Flor’s teenage kids.
