Baby, Why Don’t We Go?

“Even resources you don’t have, you can use them.… I made up some resources,” said D. SMITH after a screening of her celebrated documentary, Kokomo City, for which she acted as director, producer, cinematographer, composer, and editor. (Her admission that she cut the film using iMovie elicited a ripple of sympathetic laughter inside the main theater of the IFC Center.) Smith’s black-and-white cinematography unifies a collage of verité interviews interspersed with campy reenactments and stock footage. But against this visual unity, Smith refuses to smooth over the differences among her subjects—four Black trans women making a living as sex workers—in pursuit of easy metanarrative. In interviews shot largely in their own homes, , , , and speak to questions of passing, their relationships with Black cis men and women, and their proximity to deadly violence. The film doesn’t impinge on these conversations but treats them as a starting point, Smith noted, “I hope trans women are inspired to protect other trans women.”