“A Thousand and One” (dir. A.V. Rockwell)
There are two particularly bruising lines that bookend first-time feature director A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” a vivid portrait of Harlem life from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. “There’s more to life than fucked-up beginnings,” Inez, a woman living life in New York on her own terms and brilliantly played by R&B super-artist/actress Teyana Taylor, tells her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola). She has kidnapped him out of the foster care system, which has kept them separated in the aftermath of her stint at Rikers Island beginning in 1993, and now hopes to give him a better life. But at the end of the movie, after a decades-spanning, bittersweet bond forms and fizzles between them and shattering revelations are had, she tells the older Terry (Josiah Cross), “I fucked up. Life goes on. So what?”
Piercingly specific in its details, Terry and Inez’s story nevertheless serves as a heart-wrenching microcosm for the greater struggles of Black New Yorkers trying to survive in the face of a rapidly gentrifying city and its police department’s deadly indifference to Black people. “A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the movie upside down and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Taylor anchors Rockwell’s deft direction and ambitiously time-spanning screenplay with her powerhouse turn; tapping into her own hardscrabble backstory as a born-and-raised New Yorker, as well as her palpable kinship with her director, Taylor delivers a performance as fiercely committed to her character as Inez is to Terry — it’s a turn that reflects a massive amount of talent on both sides of the camera. —RL