Kokomo City director D. Smith interview: ‘This film really could start a conversation’
Exclusive: The filmmaker hopes that her unflinching documentary about four Black trans sex workers — one of whom was murdered earlier this year — will help to humanise one of the most vulnerable sectors of the LGBTQ+ community
Kokomo City is a vivid, delicious and slick documentary about the lives of four Black trans women sex workers across New York and Atlanta.
Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver are all attempting to better their lot in a world that is dehumanising and violent for trans people.
This frank and unfiltered account, told in the women’s own unvarnished words, is often unflinching about the coercion and structural deprivation that has led these girls to make their living in this way.
The film stuns as a portrait of Black trans life, of vitality, in the face of a cisgender, heterosexual dogma actively working to rebuke the magnificence and beauty of that life.
“I don’t know if this film is going to save us. But I think it really could start a conversation that could get us on the path of respecting and supporting and healing.”
Since its release, Kokomo City has won the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award, as well as the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award.
And when I meet director and producer D. Smith during the BFI’s annual Flare LGBTQ+ film festival, its screening has just received a standing ovation.
As a Black trans woman, Smith explains how she was inspired to make the film to find out more about how some of her community live. The idea came when Smith was going through hardship as a direct result of transitioning.
“I started off as a music producer,” she begins, reflecting on a 15-year career in the industry. “I worked with everyone from [Lil] Wayne to Keri Hilson to Katy Perry. And when I started to transition, I lost a lot of work. I lost a lot. Everyone stopped calling.
“And so, years gone by of me sleeping on people’s couches, and I just kept thinking: ‘I’m in this position after everything that I’ve accomplished. I can only imagine what a transgender woman that has to do sex work [to survive] — what is she going through?’”
She wanted to tell the story of these women who were “always brushed under the carpet, even by other trans women, because it’s looked down upon; it is, quote-unquote, not a great representation of our ‘community’”.
The film affectionately takes its name from 30s blues singer, James ‘Kokomo’ Arnold, whose song ‘Sissy Man Blues’ features in the film, and boasts its infamous lyric: “Lord, if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man”.
“When I started to transition, I lost a lot of work. I lost a lot. Everyone stopped calling”
Kokomo City boldly and unabashedly tackles tough subject matter head-on. In its opening moments, what appears to be a tense recollection of a time Koko and a client struggled for a gun, gives way to subversive humour in both its retelling and its conclusion.
As well as the stories of its four protagonists, we hear the accounts of several Black men — the women’s clients and lovers — who discuss their relationships with the women. They provide a searing and provocative insight into the myriad forces of masculinity, sexuality and sexual mores. These throw up knotty questions about shame, attraction, love and intimacy, attempting to fill the rooms in which these men often lay down with these women with the proud light of truth and self-reflection.
“[Some of them are] rappers in New York,” says Smith. “I’d mentioned what I was working on. I went up to the Bronx by myself, and I filmed them. They wanted to be in the film, and it was great,” she says. Their lexicon and their politics might not always align with progressive opinion, but Smith thought it vital that they have the space to speak their truth.
“I think the takeaway, really most importantly, is for Black people to understand that there needs to be a healing process”
Its foundation in harsh and illuminating realities is something that not only lends Kokomo City its authenticity and vividness, but it unfortunately reminds us in all too final and literal terms of the impact transmisogyny has on the lives of its subjects. Mere weeks after my interview with Smith, Koko Da Doll, one of the film’s stars, became the 13th trans person to be killed in the US in 2023. “After losing participant and sister Koko Da Doll to gun violence, a greater sense of urgency loomed. It also validated the core purpose of speaking with each woman in this film. To show and prove how beautiful but vulnerable trans women are,” said Smith following Koko’s death.
Kokomo City succeeds in pouring life — brilliant and blemished — into its subjects’ stories, providing them with a megaphone through which they can speak out. There are no neat edges or boxes. These girls are raw, real and concrete, and the film succeeds in showing them as they are, in a world that displaces and takes away their potential. It is a world that failed Koko, and one that requires radical re-envisioning to prevent further fatal violence.
“I think the takeaway, really most importantly, is for Black people to understand that there needs to be a healing process,” says Smith. “I don’t know if this film is going to save us. But I think it really could start a conversation that could get us on the path of respecting and supporting and healing.”
Kokomo City hits UK cinemas on 4 August 2023.