The Fall 2023 edition of the Oxford American made its way into the world yesterday. Themed around Southern film, the issue is guest-edited by Tayler Montague, a filmmaker and writer with family roots in Virginia.
The main stories for Issue 122 give close inspection to the work of established Southern directors Les Blank, Debbie Allen and Kasi Lemmons, as well as newcomer D. Smith, whose debut, “Kokomo City” (2023), is a documentary about four Black trans sex workers in Atlanta and New York. Here’s a bit from Jewel Wicker’s essay about the film:
To ensure her sources were comfortable, Smith says she’d talk with them before turning her camera on. They’d smoke. They’d drink. Then they’d get to work. The result is a candor sometimes revealed in intimate shots of the women lounging on their beds. In the notable opening scene, Mitchell recalls an encounter with a man that included the two of them fighting to gain control of his gun and ended with them eventually deciding to still have sex. KOKOMO CITY uses humor to explore trauma, with the handheld camera often shaking from Smith’s laughter. Sometimes, she laughed so hard she had to cover up the shakiness with B-roll.
The issue also includes writing by long-time OA contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan and an experimental piece by Justin Phillip Reed, who won the National Book Award for his poetry collection “Indecency.” Also of note is Jeremy Steen’s “Background Noise,” which comically and heartbreakingly recalls the author’s experience as a musical extra on the Austin, Texas, set of Terrence Malick’s “Song to Song.” It features this killer line: “It’s not every day you get to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. It’s even more rare you get to watch them pretend to be you while you pretend to be yourself.”
To purchase a copy of the issue, head here.