73 minutes
2023, US
English
Director: D. Smith
Documentary

KOKOMO CITY is a raw depiction of the lives of four black trans sex workers as they confront the dichotomy between the black community and themselves.

In 2017, photographer Laura Patricia Alvarez returned to their hometown of Monterrey, Mexico and started working on the Imperio de llusiones (Illusions Empire) photography series. Portraying Monterrey’s drag and LGBTQIA+ communities has allowed them to deal with personal issues related to the construction of their own identity while asking new questions about the dynamics that shape a collective queer identity. In 2016, Brazilian historian Isabel Machado moved to Monterrey. Two years later she started an oral history project to record the life stories of drag and travesti artists. They knew of each other’s works but only met officially (virtually) in January 2020, when Isabel was living in the US. Their collaboration, “Co-documenting an Illusions Empire,” started as an (unsuccessful) grant application. For this video, shot and directed by Laura in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, they selected audio excerpts of the oral history interviews conducted with the artists out of drag and invited the queens to “lip-synch their lives.”