![]() “I wanted to be like my aunt, or a woman from church who was just feminine and soft, quiet and demure and attractive.”Įven now, Smith is critical of what she calls the “red-carpet narrative” of trans femininity: the idea that the only time we see trans women in the media is when they’re dolled-up to the nines, and never just in their day-to-day lives, without the makeup and gloss. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, the closest thing Smith saw to a role model was RuPaul: “He was closest to what I wanted, but I didn’t want the flashy, over-the-top ,” she recalls. She knew she was a woman from the age of seven, and every night would pray to wake up female: “I was trying to make a deal with God – ‘I won’t be mad at you any more if you just make me a girl – we can just move past this.’” She was raised in a religious household and loved music from a young age, singing in her church choir and realising quickly that “the ability to create music, and the amount of freedom and influence that music gives you, is priceless”. Photograph: Emily Assiran/Contour by Getty Images for Stacy’s Pita Chipsīorn in Miami, Smith didn’t grow up wanting to be a film-maker. Left to right … Dominique Silver, D Smith, Daniella Carter and Koko Da Doll. We look like you, we’re fun, and we’re vulnerable like you, and we want love like you.” “I thought to myself, ‘This is riveting.’ I just wanted to re-create the narrative of what trans women truly are – we’re human, and this is what we look like. ![]() “Not to compare trans women to the Joker, but when I saw that film, it was mind-blowing – it stripped him down, all of the makeup and stuff, and we saw the human side of him,” she recalls. Consisting of unadorned, verite-style interviews with four Black trans sex workers in Atlanta and New York – as well as a handful of trans-attracted men – it takes its cues from vivid, straight-talking films such as Paris Is Burning and Word Is Out.īut Smith also drew influence from a film rarely mentioned in the same breath as staples of the queer canon: Todd Phillips’s pulpy, controversial 2019 superhero flick Joker. Kokomo City, the debut feature by musician-turned-film-maker D Smith, sits in a clear lineage of classic documentaries about the LGBTQ+ community.
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