Kokomo City

Morning routines and conversations in bed, gossip and hard talk. In a series of encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish and candour, which leads to deep and passionate reflections on socio-political and social realities, as well as perceptive analyses of belonging and identity within the Black community and beyond. Haunting black-and-white images and a carefully chosen soundtrack organically blend staged and reconstructed scenes, performative interventions and associative collages of biographical set pieces. Dreams and memories, battles fought and crises overcome are openly addressed, without shying away from topics such as precarity and violence. The protagonists also tell us about their lovers, friends and families, and how these relationships are shaped by taboos and fetishisation but also by their own desires. These vibrant portraits give space to their uninhibited and defiant narratives and undermine white, cis-heteronormative assumptions and stigmatisations.