REVIEW: The Lives Of Black Trans Women In ‘Kokomo City’

Kokomo City is the documentary directorial debut of D. Smith interviewing four Black trans women, Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, and Dominique Silver. They are sex workers in Atlanta and New York City sharing their lives, their work, and their experiences. Presented in black and white, the film mixes interview footage with dramatization to create a unique visual experience while talking more candidly about its subject than the typical media depicting Black trans women would.

The first thing that struck me about Kokomo City was its soundtrack. For nearly the whole film, the soundtrack is upbeat, or at the very least, sexy. The dramatizations that play out in the background while we hear the women speak depict everything from sex to violence. Komomo City is meant to be a little bit titillating. Even just the black and white nature of the movie adds a level of seductive film noir. It’s a movie designed largely to engage and disarm a cis audience who are largely unaware of or even actively complicit in kinds of violence against the people and their world herein. Its goal is to first explain who its subject are as people and then turn that normalization into a charge to do better by them.

The arc of the women’s stories from why they started sex work to the struggles they’ve faced as Black people, as women, and as trans people is gripping. We’re quickly made  to recognize the multiplicity of Black trans experiences and the commonality of them all at once by way of the stories they tell. But when the stories go to dark places, the soundtrack brings us back to levity. And when stories get into detail about sex, we’re reminded of the traumas or simply the mundanity of it all. In both instances, the stories are interesting but they’re presented as matter of fact rather than something to be fetishized or exploited.

The movie is also littered with interviews with men or about men who have sex with Black trans women. Each instance demonstrates a different relationship these men might have to the women: sometimes transactional, sometimes romantic, often as mundane as any other relationship. We’re given their qualifications as rappers, as macho men, or as sensitive types all the same. It’s a well-employed strategy to give cis men in the audience anchors to latch themselves onto as they recognize themselves while hearing the generally positive and caring ways these men speak about the trans women in their lives.

Meanwhile, Kokomo City offers scathing criticism of the hypocrisy, cruelty, and ignorance heaped upon its subjects by all manner of other people, including white people, women, Black men, and their families. It’s vastly successful at making you feel ashamed for your complicity in their narratives while still driving you to be better instead of being sorry, in whatever form that ought to take for you.

Kokomo City strives to awaken its uninformed audience members to the myriad ways they bring harm to Black trans women and to engender solidarity among those who can see themselves somewhere or another in the film’s subjects. It stretches itself wide enough to be accessible to a vast audience while being so specific to the stories, struggles, and joys of the four women who bare it all over the movie’s 70 minutes.

Kokomo City was screened as part of Outfest LA 2023 and will begin playing in U.S. theaters July 28th.