The first time you truly see Inez De La Paz, the galvanic center of “A Thousand and One,” she is framed against a wall that’s as red as a fire alarm. Inez is on the move, as she often is in this heart-clencher, the low-angle camera worshipfully pointed up at her. And no wonder: Inez is a dynamo, a force. She’s tough and beautiful, mouthy and unwaveringly loyal, but if she moves fast it’s often because she has no other choice. All she has is forward momentum, her unbending will and the small, somber boy at her side.
Played by a mesmerizing Teyana Taylor, Inez holds you rapt throughout this sweeping New York story of love and survival, motherhood and gentrification. It opens in 1994 and then jumps first to 2001 and later to 2005, a time frame that takes it from the beginning of the zero-tolerance years of the Giuliani mayoralty to the start of the Bloomberg boom times. Along the way, buildings fall and rise, and Inez raises that small boy, Terry (she usually calls him just T), an unsmiling, guarded child who grows into an anxious teenager and then, under Inez’s hawkish watch, continues to grow and thrive, eventually becoming some kind of miracle.
“A Thousand and One” is the feature debut of A.V. Rockwell, and it too can feel like a wonder. It’s a small movie only in the most pedestrian sense: It’s intimate, humanly scaled and concerns ordinary people with ordinary struggles. It doesn’t have stars, just a few familiar faces and names, including Taylor, a musician, as well as the actor Will Catlett, who plays Lucky, Inez’s gruff love interest. But these faces have character, personality, history, as does this vision of New York and its crowded byways and sagging buildings, with their faded grandeur, smeary windows, fragile pipes and impastos of paint lacquering the halls.
What interests Rockwell are the lives in the apartments and how these lives joyfully and chaotically flow back and forth into the streets, pumping energy into the city, enlivening and sustaining it. Rockwell, who also wrote the movie, was born and raised in Queens. (Her parents are from Jamaica.) She knows New York, and she wants you to know (and feel) it, too. She has a documentarian’s sense of place, and while she shows the grime and the mess, she also finds the beauty — and the poignant history — in how the city’s jagged, kaleidoscopic parts restlessly fit together to make a vibrant whole.
