A Thousand and One

A potent, poignant performance by singer Teyana Taylor graces AV Rockwell's debut drama about the difficulties people face while living within the system that damaged them. Leaving Rikers Island prison in 1994, Inez snatches her six-year-old son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) from his foster family and hides away in Harlem. Vowing to be the kind of mother she never had, Inez acquires fake documents for the boy (played at 13 and 17 by Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross) and marries her unreliable lover, Lucky (Will Catlett), to give him a father figure. But the past catches up when the academically gifted Terry starts making plans for his future. Played by Taylor without compromise, Inez is as prickly as she is protective, as she reckons with infidelity and insecurity. A tale of two cities also emerges, as Rockwell reflects on how the social and policing policies of successive New York mayors punished the marginalised. Evocatively photographed by Erick K Yue and scored with Quincy Jones-esque style by Gary Gunn, this wrenching study of domestic struggle in a prejudicial society is sometimes tough to take, but hits home hard.