A Thousand and One

 

Writer / director A.V. Rockwell's A Thousand and One is as viscerally potent as the sights and sounds of the city that serves both as backdrop and counterpoint to the film's story of a Black New York City mother trying mightily over the span of a decade to protect her son from ravenous threats.

When we meet Teyana Taylor's Inez, she is trying to get her bearings after being released from Riker's Island Prison for theft. While standing outside a group home in Brooklyn, she spies the familiar face of a shy young boy, Terry. She is reunited with him and slowly begins to once again become a presence in his life.

When Inez learns some time later that the boy was injured while in the care of his foster mother, Inez decides that Terry would be safer with her even though she has neither a steady job nor a place to live. She takes him from the hospital, changes his name, gets fake papers for him and they begin new lives in Harlem.

It's Inez's determination not to be separated from Terry -- to see him to adulthood -- that is the beating heart of this uncompromising tale of artifice and survival during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years of crime suppression and urban renewal, both of which taking an untoward toll on the city's Black and poor.

Soon Inez and Terry -- who is played at various ages by Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross -- are joined by Inez's former boyfriend, Lucky (William Catlett), who slowly warms to the idea of being father to Terry. The three become that most tenuous of entities -- a struggling Black family in an urban environment that is crumbling emotionally, psychologically and materially. The only certainty in their lives is uncertainty.

It's nearly impossible to overstate the wonder that is Taylor's performance as Inez. Hers is a lived-in face and body, which is not to say Inez is worn or depleted, just experienced. Yes, she's damaged, as are most of the characters in Rockwell's story, but she's as wise as she is flawed and fierce. A marvelous character who will win viewers' hearts even as she breaks them.