A Thousand and One
2023 · A.V. Rockwell
Struggling but unapologetically living on her own terms, Inez is moving from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. With her 6-year-old son Terry in foster care and unable to leave him again, she kidnaps him so they can build their life together. As the years go by, their family grows and Terry becomes a smart yet quiet teenager, but the secret that has defined their lives threatens to destroy the home they have so improbably built.
dir. A.V. Rockwell · 2023
A.V. Rockwell's debut won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and announced a filmmaker with a novelist's patience: the story of Inez, a hairdresser fresh out of Rikers in 1994, who takes her six-year-old son out of foster care without permission and raises him in Harlem under an assumed life. The secret ticks quietly beneath a decade and a half of ordinary days while the city transforms around them — Giuliani's stop-and-frisk years shading into Bloomberg-era gentrification, landlords circling, the neighborhood's complexion changing scaffold by scaffold — so that the film becomes a double portrait, of a mother and of a Harlem being priced out of existence. Teyana Taylor, in a ferocious, wounded performance that swept critics' awards, holds the center while three actors carry Terry from boyhood to the edge of manhood. Eric K. Yue's grainy, sun-struck 35mm-styled images and Gary Gunn's orchestral score give a small story the scale of an epic. Rockwell has said she made it as a love letter to the women New York failed to love back.
Lines of influence
- Moonlight (2016) — Pioneers the chaptered life-stage structure that casts three different actors to embody one person across time — the exact multi-actor-aging device A Thousand and One uses to track Terry from child to teen.
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — Establishes the grainy, available-light neorealist portrait of Black working-class urban survival where the neighborhood itself, not plot, carries the film.
- Crooklyn (1994) — Model for period-specific reconstruction of a Black NYC block, rendering the family apartment and street as a living character anchored to an exact era.
- Pariah (2011) — Bradford Young's underexposed, richly saturated grain lighting Black skin in low-light NYC interiors — the tactile cinematographic grammar Rockwell inherits.
- Middle of Nowhere (2012) — Builds its drama on a Black woman tethered to an incarcerated partner, making the incarceration-and-reentry cycle the story's emotional engine under soft natural light.
- If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) — Period NYC romance ruptured by wrongful incarceration, carried on a warm film-stock palette and a swelling orchestral score that ennobles Black interior life.
- The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) — Frames gentrification-as-dispossession and scores it with Emile Mosseri's sweeping orchestral theme, treating the changing city as the true antagonist-character.
- Boyhood (2014) — Sets the template for the longitudinal time-spanning epic tracing a child into adulthood; Rockwell adapts the ambition through recast actors rather than real-time shooting.
- George Washington (2000) — Applies 35mm anamorphic lyricism and natural light to poor children moving through a decaying American landscape, elevating the everyday into myth.
- Fish Tank (2009) — Handheld, available-light naturalism inside a volatile single-mother household, using nonprofessional texture to make domestic instability feel unmediated.
- Ratcatcher (1999) — Grainy, tactile poetic realism of tenement childhood, finding lyric close-ups within social-realist squalor.
- Do the Right Thing (1989) — Stages a single stretch of one Black neighborhood as the film's actual protagonist, the city-as-character logic Rockwell brings to 1990s Harlem.
- Nickel Boys (2024) — Extends the grainy, sensory Black-life realism and a withheld-truth narrative structure whose reveal recontextualizes everything before it.
- Mudbound (2017) — A time-spanning, multi-strand epic shot by Rachel Morrison on grainy naturalist stock that treats interwoven Black and white American lives across years.
- Fruitvale Station (2013) — Intimate handheld naturalism on grainy 16mm rooted in one specific city geography, compressing Black urban life into charged everyday texture.
- Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) — A Black-woman-authored debut portrait of a young Black woman navigating 1990s NYC on the subway and street, the same authorship-and-place lineage as Rockwell's first feature.