Review of A Thousand and One, directed by A.V. Rockwell

What drew me first into A Thousand and One was when I saw the poster for it on the Coming Soon section of the AMC Theaters app. I didn’t know much about this little movie, especially considering after the fact I now know that A.V. Rockwell is making her theatrical film debut with this movie.

But when I saw The Quiet Girl the other week, I landed on the trailer for this movie in the beginning and was absolutely blown away by what I was seeing. I booked a ticket immediately after the screening of The Quiet Girl, and when I went to see A Thousand in One, I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout.

The entire theater I was in, on a Sunday afternoon, was sold out.

After the fact I would say this is such an important movie for everyone to watch, as it teaches a lot about empathy—something people need when considering the situations a lot of Black women, especially mothers, will go for taking in a child and treating them like they deserve the world and all the opportunities in it. This is a heavy movie, although there are sprinkles of comedy throughout.

I was pleased at the turnout, but, as I looked around, I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the room who wasn’t Black. One of my greatest loves for cinema is the fact it can teach radical empathy, so it was disappointing to not see other kinds of people showing up to learn and see this movie’s journey.

Onwards with the review!

A woman kidnaps her son back from the foster care system and raises him to have a better situation than her.

Teyana Taylor stars in the leading role of Inez in A Thousand and One, and she absolutely blows the roof off in this performance. We meet her when she is still an inmate at Rikers Island, serving jail time in New York, and when she’s released, she first goes to her former job and collects the pay she didn’t get.

She sees a child in the distance and says she is his mother, and that she wants to be around him more. When she discovers he fell out of a window at foster care and is in the hospital, she starts visiting him in his hospital room.

We, as the viewer, learn that his name is Terry, he is six years old, and he likes Transformers, not monkey stuffed plushes.

While he’s in the hospital, Inez asks him he wants to come home with her. He agrees, but the first problem facing them is the fact she doesn’t actually have anywhere to live. She ends up taking him out for pizza and that night, phones up everyone from her past to see if someone would let them stay for awhile.

Her former friend in Harlem agrees to let the two stay in her mother’s brownstone, but friction with the girl’s mother ultimately leads the two to be back out on the streets.

Inez and Terry find a home with an older woman watching her grandson, as her daughter is an addict, as Inez builds up the money to get them an apartment. She forges documents with a fake name, social security, and birthplace for Terry so he can attend school without being questioned; his supposed kidnapping has already reached the NYC news, leading Inez to become even more paranoid about letting him out.

Part of her trauma stems from the fact she, too, was once living in foster care, and didn’t end up getting to live the life she wanted to live—throughout the movie, she mentions a dream of opening up her own hair place, but never actually gets to do that.

When she does get them an apartment, her former boyfriend, Lucky, gets out of jail and joins them. He doesn’t seem to faithful in the beginning as he’s caught looking at other girls, and Inez and Lucky fight a lot. Their fights are also about Terry, as Lucky doesn’t see Terry as his son.

He warms up to Terry in the end, though, and when Inez and Lucky decide to get married, Lucky gives him a pep talk saying that he will view Terry like his own blood, that he will protect him. This is set to the incoming backdrop of changes about to happen in New York.

Giulani’s safety and cleaning up the neighborhoods speech is played to a backdrop of a rapidly changing Harlem.

More Black men are getting stopped and frisked on the street, and in the first time skip to when Terry is thirteen, he is stopped with one of his friends on the street, much to Inez’s horror (she is afraid he will be taken away due her kidnapping him from foster care).

Lucky and Inez’s relationship begins to fall apart during this time, but in the background Terry’s school counselors advice Inez and him to make him apply for the specialized high schools in New York.

He takes the test and gets into one of the most competitive schools—Brooklyn Technical.

More time passes. They still live in the same apartment, but a white man has bought out the building and is slowly forcing the family to leave. Terry got into college, but he wants to get a job to help Inez out, so he takes his fake SSN and birth certificate to his counselor, who realizes what is happening here.

At the same time, Lucky is slowly dying of cancer, and when he dies, that opens the floodgates. Inez takes off when Terry tells her about the counselor wanting to meet with her, and the next day, Terry opens the door and finds the police, his counselor, and a social worker.

They reveal Inez isn’t his birth mother, and she took him off the street.

Inez and Terry get one last emotional scene together when he returns to pack his things, and Inez reveals she was the one who found him abandoned on the street corner all those years ago when he was a toddler.

This final scene is her telling him that he will receive the opportunities she never had, and despite him expressing his fear he will never have a home, he really does as long as she is alive. Taylor really begins to shine here as a woman falling apart, saying angrily to her son that no one cares for Black women.

But in this movie’s careful eye, all the care in the world is placed in framing her properly.

Overall Thoughts

This is a solid movie with some gorgeous moments when it comes to cinematography and how the story unfolds. There’s quite a bit about trauma and generational cycles with Lucky and Inez, but even though Terry is not their real son, I would say that they manage to break the cycle with him.

He has the opportunity to go to a good school and college, even though he may not be able to pursue his passion in the arts. There’s also a ton packed in about the gentrification of Harlem and New York City—and although the movie ends in the mid-2000s, the situation has increasingly gotten worse.

Columbia has bought off a chunk of the neighborhood and the thriving black community and businesses that existed here are getting priced out.

I really enjoyed A Thousand and One, although I thought the pacing started getting really slow right in the middle of when Terry experiences life as a thirteen year old. Give Taylor awards though—she deserves it.

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