The Open Arms Youth Centre, Tulsa, Oklahoma, sits squarely in the buckle of the Bible Belt. This city in the USA has almost 400,000 inhabitants, over 4000 churches, and is the location that Danish filmmaker Jannik Splidsboel gravitated towards in his latest documentary, MISFITS – focusing on the lives of three LGBT teenagers, who use Open Arms as their meeting place.

In the opening of the documentary we meet seventeen-year old Larissa, who has been enrolled in a “second chance school” for those who have been bullied in mainstream education to the extent that they may have already lost some of their queer friends to suicide. We also meet nineteen-year old Ben: a charmingly camp, Hispanic lad, whose sitting room chat with his family at first seems perilously at odds with his sexuality; and finally sixteen-year old D, a teenager who identifies as pansexual, and whose eyes display a world-weariness that suggest he may have seen a lot of strife already at such a young age.

For a brief moment, carrying the knife doesn’t seem like such a bad idea…

Splidsboel and his cameraman, Henrik Bohm Ispen, gain access to the teenagers to the extent that they have permission to film them at school, at home, and on nights out. What this footage reveals straight away is that these are three essentially ‘average’ young people, certainly from a European viewpoint, who are going about their lives, doing what teenagers do, slowly learning to assimilate into the adult world. The title ‘misfit’ refers to society’s view of the teenagers in Tulsa. It is saddening to see groups of people in churches and on street-corners professing to preach about morality, whilst damaging their perceived moral high-ground with inflammatory, ugly, homophobic abuse of equal members of their community. In a telling scene, D reveals how he always takes a knife out with him on nights out – tucked into a doubled-up pair of socks. His explanation in part chimes in with the American sensibility for the right to carry arms, but also asks the question of the audience: just how would a large group of youths, some perhaps carrying knives or guns themselves, deal with a mild-mannered, regular-looking lad who they know identifies as pansexual? For a brief moment, carrying the knife doesn’t seem like such a bad idea…

This may be a documentary film in Oklahoma, but the direction is certainly Scandinavian, and so whilst this underlying danger and tension is briefly focused upon, Splidsboel thankfully gives far more screen-time to Larissa, Ben, and D than to the bigots and homophobes who make up a section of Tulsa’s community. The emasculation and feminisation of Larissa and Ben on nights out captures the teenagers playing with their gender identities. Ben and his brother drive around the suburban streets of their hometown, discussing their hopes and fears in a remarkably candid way considering the presence of the camera. However, it’s Larissa and her girlfriend’s festive nighttime walk through the streets of Tulsa, lit up by a dazzling array of Christmas lights that put London’s Oxford Street display to shame, and a flickering and shimmering neon-lit kiss that sums up the documentary’s central message. No matter how dark and fundamental the religious disdain towards you may be, if you have a loving family and group of friends, a second family in the case of the Open Arms Youth Centre, then, in the word’s of Ben’s mum, “I think you’ve actually got a pretty good life if you ask me.”

MISFITS premiered in the Panorama Dokumente strand at Berlinale 2015.