A Thousand and One
2023 · A.V. Rockwell
When you want a film to sit with — a serious, absorbing drama for a night you're ready to feel something and think about mothers, cities, and what people sacrifice to keep a family together. More challenge than comfort, but deeply rewarding.
What it's about
Fresh out of Rikers in 1994, a hairdresser named Inez does the one thing she can't undo: she takes her six-year-old son Terry out of foster care without permission and raises him in Harlem under an assumed life. The film follows them across more than a decade of ordinary days — school, work, a growing family — while the secret ticks underneath and the neighborhood gentrifies around them, block by block.
The experience
Patient, tender, and quietly suspenseful — it moves like a novel, letting years pass while a low hum of dread builds under the love. It earns its emotions the slow way, and the last stretch hits hard.
Performances
Teyana Taylor is ferocious and wounded as Inez — a performance that swept critics' awards — and three different actors carry Terry from boyhood to the edge of manhood without a seam showing.
The craft
Eric K. Yue's grainy, sun-warmed cinematography makes 90s Harlem feel remembered rather than recreated, and A.V. Rockwell's script threads a city's transformation — stop-and-frisk into gentrification, landlords circling — through one apartment's story without ever turning into a lecture. The time jumps are handled with a novelist's confidence.
Why it matters
It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and announced A.V. Rockwell as a major new American filmmaker; it's already a touchstone for portraits of Black motherhood and a Harlem being priced out of existence.
Reception & legacy: how A Thousand and One was received, argued over, and remembered →
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.