A Thousand and One

After a decade of writing and directing short films, A.V. Rockwell makes her feature debut with A Thousand and One, the heartfelt tale of a mother and son living in New York City at the end of last century and the beginning of this one.

The film opens in 1994, with 22-year-old Inez (Teyana Taylor) getting out of a short stay in prison. She kidnaps Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), her 6-year-old son, from the foster care system and eventually gets a little apartment for the two of them and some new identification papers for the boy. In time, the two are joined by Lucky (William Catlett), who is not Terry’s father biologically but seemingly falls into that role when he marries Inez.

Terry comes of age and the film jumps ahead to 2001, where he is played by Aven Courtney, and later to 2005, where Josiah Cross assumes the role. Rockwell’s first feature screenplay does not have an especially well-defined narrative, its focus wandering almost all of the time. And yet, it keeps us engaged with authenticity and specificity you can only find in a limited release independent film like this.

Your attention is rewarded by a strong final act, in which a twist I cannot spoil gives meaning to everything that has preceded it and dramatic weight to the messy situation we’re left to sort out.

By centering on a quiet, underprivileged black youth at three stages of his upbringing, A Thousand and One invites inevitable comparisons to Moonlight, 2016’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Like most movies, it cannot favorably withstand such comparisons, but there is enough substance here to qualify this as a compelling debut for a promising new voice.

Just a few years ago, encountering the work of a female writer-director was something you had to go out of your way to do. Opportunities have expanded considerably during Hollywood’s newfound commitment to inclusivity and diversity and while movies on the whole have not gotten better as a direct result of this, there is clear benefit to having the human experience processed through a multitude of disparate perspectives. Someone else could have made a movie like this, but they would not have made it with Rockwell’s unique passion and eye for detail.

It is unclear how much of the movie comes from Rockwell’s own life. With no Wikipedia page, her biography takes shape via various interviews she has given in support of the short films she’s made. One dubious site claims she was born in 1970, although photographs suggest she’s about half that age, which would not make her easily identify with either the mother or the son of this story, each struggling to overcome the disadvantages of their circumstances. Certain aspects of Terry’s academic trajectory do align with experiences that Rockwell has shared in interviews.

What is absolutely clear is that Rockwell hails from New York, although her attempts to document the city’s gentrification, marrying sound clips of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg to shots of out-of-place chain locations of Party City and Chuck E. Cheese, did not add the intended weight for me, someone who spent most of the years in question in Manhattan.