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D. Smith: From Music to 'Kokomo City' for Black History Month
- Adam L. McMath
- Feb 2, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 29
D. Smith made her name in music. Now she's made "Kokomo City," a documentary that announced her as a filmmaker worth taking seriously — and for us at Black Alphabet, hers is exactly the kind of story Black History Month is for.
Smith's imagination has run ahead of her circumstances since childhood, and "Kokomo City," her directorial debut, is where it landed. The film won the NEXT Innovator and Audience Awards: NEXT at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Shot in black and white, it follows four Black transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia and lets them speak about their identities and their lives on their own terms. The Black Alphabet Film Festival screened it in Chicago in 2023 as well.
The film came out of Smith's own story. After 15 years in the music industry, her transition got her blackballed — the calls stopped, the rooms closed. That experience turned her attention to trans women for whom sex work is survival, and the empathy she brings to the women on screen runs through every frame.
She made the film the hard way. Money for camera equipment was short and she had to fight for funding, but she found the support and shot it anyway. The result is raw and honest — it puts the realities Black trans women face in front of the viewer and doesn't blink.
"Kokomo City" hands the microphone to women the media usually talks about instead of to. It's an argument, made in practice, for representation that actually represents — not the version cut for comfort.
Smith is a trans woman working in two industries that weren't built to welcome her, and her work in both has forced doors open. What she makes starts conversations that outlast the credits — the kind a society actually needs to have.
Watch "Kokomo City." It's D. Smith's clearest statement so far — a film about the lives of Black transgender women, made with honesty and compassion by someone who knows what's at stake.
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