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The Tender, Tragic Social Realism of A Thousand and One


The sad story at the heart of A Thousand and One feels intimately familiar. It sort of takes until the end and a major twist to truly reveal the depth of that, but there’s still a stirring resonance to the hard circumstances of a mother and son getting by in poverty over the course of a decade in New York; let alone the fact that their situation is an illegal one. Early in the movie, Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor), freshly released from a  six-year prison sentence finds her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) on a street corner in Brooklyn. He has been living through the highly toxic state foster system, which Inez herself is also a survivor of, and is bullied by his foster siblings. After an accident, Inez visits him in the hospital and decides to abduct him -determined to find a place and a means to raise him on her own.
A.V. Rockwell’s directorial debut won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival -the award that in recent years has been won by movies like Minari and CODA, setting a significant precedent. I don’t think A Thousand and One has the legs of those movies (yet CODA shouldn’t have had either), but it is the quintessential example of the kind of movie Sundance prides itself on celebrating. A down-to-earth drama about the lives of real people on the lower rungs of societal recognition, be it due to race, class, or some other arbitrary institutional barrier. These are often stories that don’t get a platform and deserve to be told, shining a light on oft-forgotten demographics. And I felt that emphatically with A Thousand and One, because it focuses on the kinds of people that I and many others who work in public-facing jobs that can cross over with social work, see on a regular basis. I can’t think of another movie since The Florida Project that has achieved this so well.
It’s no surprise that this movie much like that is entirely bent around impoverished single parenthood. And Rockwell shows in no uncertain terms how rough it can be. When Inez takes Terry away, she is homeless, and must rely on first an old friend whose mother highly disapproves of her, and then a generous landlady in Harlem, each allowing them to live for cheap. She has the shelter as an option, but refuses to go back there due to a trauma the movie never fully explains, nor needs to. Undercutting so much of the story is stringent commentary on the horrible social welfare system in America and in New York specifically, so poorly managed that they become systems of perpetual poverty and crime. Inez is desperately determined to break that pattern for Terry, even as she commits a crime to raise him, giving him a different public name and removing themselves from the borough he was fostered in. Once she’s able to rent her own place she even invites her boyfriend Lucky (Will Catlett) to move in and become a father figure for Terry, stating explicitly she wants them to be a family.
The movie takes place over the span of eleven years, noted through both Terry’s developing adolescence and more curiously a series of soundbites played over atmospheric establishing shots of the city that allude to Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship in the 90s (bizarre to think about now) or Michael Bloomberg’s in the 2000s. The focus on municipal politics more than national as temporal footnotes, and in the context of an overview of the city is a very clever and extremely pointed choice on Rockwell’s part. It forcefully draws your attention to the changing landscape of the city, and particularly subjects of low-income housing and gentrification. Both Giuliani and Bloomberg were and remain exceedingly rich men, while the city they ran has consistently left more and more people behind.  It’s this gradually decaying world against which Inez and Terry struggle, the signs of a vanishing community dotted throughout. And it contributes subtly to the film’s tension, creating the atmosphere of a city closing in on mother and son and their secret. Rockwell builds it very well in its more overt character too, the systemic threat that they will be found out; apparent any time Inez has to go through a bureaucratic channel, fill out a form, or present Terry’s birth certificate -which he eventually attempts to do himself when applying to a music college, having aspirations to be a composer in the vein of Quincy Jones. So much of their lives over the years is tinged with this danger. It reminds me a lot of Shoplifters in this sense, this arrangement that takes advantage of a broken system that is itself also caused by it, and the very notion of kidnapping for love.
Taylor gives a stupendous, raw performance here, quite impressive given it is her first leading role. She conveys palpably that pent-up frustration which feeds into her desperate need to make a better life for Terry; her singularly -focused maternal convictions never come off derivatively, they feel distinct and borne out of authenticity. This goes doubly for Inez’s language, her composure, her style, all of which define the character more, her world and background that Taylor draws on with commendable intimate dedication. The harshness of her life shows through in her entire essence, from her stony face to her calculated poise. And it makes her mission for Terry resonate with additional power, while also rendering the ultimate track of the surprise ending more astonishing. I should say too that Josiah Cross, playing the teenage Terry, is very strong as well, in his own interests and certainties that especially relate in light of that twist.
Rockwell doesn’t shoot the film to any kind of a documentary aesthetic, but there are moments you feel like an observer more than an audience -glimpsing this world and specific circumstance through a window. While the movie is sometimes fueled by that tension over when they’ll be discovered, it’s often only simmering, the story more concerned with the nondescript ways Inez and Terry carve out their life, the ways she in particular strives to make it “normal” for him, and in some sweet ways succeeds. Never for a moment do you think she did the wrong thing in raising him herself. A Thousand and One is more than a tribute to determined motherhood against crushing systemic inequities, it is a portrait of a family surviving them; proving a fortitude against all manner of social biases. The tragedy is merely that they must hide at all.

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