Kokomo City: D Smith’s wise examination of the black transgender experience

One can offer no greater compliment to D Smith’s examination of the black transgender experience than that it makes the viewer, however they identify, feel a welcomed part of the busy conversation. That is largely down to the trust that Smith, a successful musician and songwriter, has established with the four sex workers who are her key subjects. Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver are, for the most part, interviewed in their homes – on beds, in bathtubs – jawing enthusiastically as they tease apart triumphs, pressures and outrages.

The film is necessarily a little shapeless. It is not as if the contributors will come to any collective conclusion. But an enormous amount of material is chewed over in a relatively short runtime.

Kokomo City inevitably touches on the enormities of racism. One contributor observes a continuing expectation that black people should represent as polite domestic servant or as toiling field worker. (She uses more robust language we can’t repeat here.) But there is also a great deal of conversation about conflicts within the subjects’ own community. In a powerful address towards the close, Carter notes that her own mother was uncertain about her transition because it meant “losing another black man”. One member of the family was moving from supposed protector to join the apparent vulnerable.

All of which would be fascinating if presented as barely mediated talking heads. But Smith, herself a trans woman, makes the most of her limited resources in a tightly edited film shot in luminous monochrome.

‘My partner will not give up meeting people for sex. I feel enormous rejection’

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You would expect the director, with her background in the music industry, to know how to score a movie, and, sure enough, the needle-drops punctuate without seeming intrusive. Elegant animations illustrate the arguments. As is so often the case in documentary, re-enactments do little more than fill up empty space, but they are sparse enough here to barely register.

[ Kokomo City is a landmark in trans representation on screen ]

It is the voices that dominate. What a busy, clattering, wise noise they make. There are tales of abuse and hypocrisy. But this is, for the most part, a positive, lively conversation. That knowledge makes it all the sadder to learn that Koko Da Doll, known formally as Rasheeda Williams, was shot dead a few weeks after the film’s successful Sundance premiere. A bitter, bitter pill.

In cinemas from Friday, August 4th