‘Kokomo City’ Director D. Smith On How She Found Trans Stars Of Her Award-Winning Film Through Instagram – For The Love Of Docs

The premiere of Kokomo City at the Sundance Film Festival last January heralded the arrival of a fresh new cinematic talent, D. Smith. Her directorial debut, a documentary about four Black trans women in New York and Atlanta, won two awards at Sundance and went on to earn prizes at the Berlinale, DocAviv, Champs-Élysées Film Festival, the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama and many other festivals.

We presented Kokomo City as the final film in our fall virtual event series For the Love of Docs, with the director joining us afterwards for a conversation about the film, which Smith also produced, shot, and edited herself. Smith explained that she originally asked others to direct but got turned down.

“I had never done a film before, so I didn’t even think about me being the director or [wearing] any of those other hats,” Smith said. “But when you get no’s, it just lets you know that it was not meant to be, and it was meant [for me] to do those parts in the film.”

Smith centers her story on Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Liyah Mitchell, and Koko Da Doll, who give an uncensored account of their experiences, including doing sex work. The director said she found her protagonists by visiting the Instagram accounts of high-profile trans people in Hollywood, and then examining reactions to their posts.

“I went through their comments,” Smith shared. “I sifted through their comments, found the girls that way, because really my goal was to cast women that look like the [trans] girls that were being killed. Those women never have a platform until it’s too late. So I wanted to get a deeper inside, intimate conversation and look into that world.”

The film is accessible to all, but Smith says she aimed it particularly at a Black audience because she was weary of seeing trans women treated as an embarrassment by so many in the African American community, or as a topic of gossip.

“It is a very small part of the community’s issues, but it is such a big part at the same time,” Smith said, “because this is what people are focused on so much in the Black community — who’s having sex with who and who’s doing what and what’s what. I guess, one day at a time, one step at a time, but this is what I wanted to offer [with the film].”

Before becoming a director, Smith earned considerable success in the music industry as a singer, songwriter, and producer. She won a Grammy Award in 2009 for her work on L’il Wayne’s album Tha Carter iii. But when she revealed her transition in 2014, that career evaporated.

“The Black men that run the industry that I was dealing with, they weren’t prepared mentally or emotionally to deal with me,” she recalled. “No matter how good we worked together or how much money I made them, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. But 10 years later, look at us now. So that’s the good news. Progress was made.”

Watch the full conversation in the video above.

For the Love of Docs is a 10-week-long virtual Deadline event series sponsored by National Geographic in partnership with the International Documentary Association (IDA). It concluded this week with Kokomo City.