“A Thousand and One” is a small but intimate character drama on one African American woman struggling to give the chance for a better life to a boy raised by her in their slum neighborhood of New York City. This story premise is pretty familiar to the core, the movie distinguishes itself via its considerable realism as well as its strong characterization, and that is more than enough for compensating for its several notable shortcomings including a possibly distracting plot turn during the last act.

The story opens with its heroine being released from the Rikers Island prison in 1994. Although her status as an African American female ex-con is pretty daunting to say the least, Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor) is quite determined about not getting sent back to jail again, and the early part of the film shows how she struggles to earn her meager living as a freelance hairdresser on the streets and alleys of the Brooklyn neighborhood.

When she is not working, Inez usually meets and sees a little 6-year-old boy named Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), and we get to know more about the rather strained personal relationship between them. Terry has been under a foster care for a while, and he does not like this at all, but there is nothing Inez can do for him at present because she is understandably not so eligible on the record for raising him.

And then there comes a moment which changes the lives of both Inez and Terry. After he gets injured due to his clumsy attempt to run away from his current foster home, Inez comes to a local hospital where he is being treated for his minor injury, and she becomes quite conflicted as coming to learn that they may not see each other again due to this incident of his. As a woman who knows too well how soul-crushing foster care can be for kids like Terry, she cannot simply turn away from him, and that is how she comes to make a choice which is going to seriously affect both of them. Without telling anyone, she takes Terry away from the hospital, and then they run away together to her old neighborhood in the Harlem area.

This legally serious act of hers is surely reported a lot in media at first, but, as already expected by Inez, there is not much trouble for her and Terry as they fortunately settle down at one apartment building belonging to a generous old African American lady. After all, nobody is particularly interested in finding one missing black kid, and all Inez will have to do is shielding him from the outside world for some time in addition to acquiring some fake documents for his new identity used for his education.

Fortunately for them, things seem to be going fairly all right for Inez and Terry. Once she gets a menial job at a nursing home in the Queens area, Inez can provide a more stable domestic environment for Terry, and she also becomes more serious about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend Lucky (Will Catlett), who has also tried to have a decent ordinary life after being released from the Rikers Island prison. Although he has some reservation about what she did for Terry, Lucky agrees to be a father for Terry in the end, and he also marries Inez not long after that.

While these three main characters continue to live together, the movie vividly captures the following passage of time during next several years. During the middle of the story, which is set in 2001, the movie gradually lets us sense the imminent social change to come into Harlem, and we also observe how things have been rather cold between Inez and Lucky. While they still care about each other, there are some issues to face between them, and Terry, who is now entering adolescence as played by Aven Courtney, is naturally nervous about that at times, though he grows up to become a promising student with lots of potential thanks to his parents.

Because both of them care about Terry’s future, Inez and Lucky try to make Terry do the right thing about his future as Terry often gets conflicted and confused about what to do with his life. While Inez struggles at times in her communication with her son mainly due to that hidden secret between them, Lucky can connect more easily with Terry in comparison, and there is a brief but poignant moment when he tenderly advises his son not to waste his precious opportunity for better education and future.

During the final act, which feels like a variation on Sidney Lumet’s “Running on Empty” (1988) with Josiah Cross playing Terry who is about to become 18 years old at that narrative point, the movie becomes quite melodramatic with what will surely make you reflect more on what was presented during its first act. I am not sure whether that is really necessary considering what has been built up so well during the rest of the film, and the screenplay by director/writer A.V. Rockwell feels rather contrived after a sudden moment of revelation, but Teyana Taylor’s uncompromising performance keeps holding everything in the movie together to the end. Without any excuse or hesitation, Taylor vividly embodies both of her character’s better and worse sides, and Will Catlett and three young performers playing Terry in the film are the effective counterparts for her strong acting.

Overall, “A Thousand and One”, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival early in this year, is realistic and powerful in its intimate character drama. and Rockwell made a commendable feature film debut here after directing a couple of short films (The movie also recently received the Breakthrough Director Award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, by the way). This is surely one of impressive debut works of this year, and it will be interesting to see whatever may come next from this promising filmmaker to watch.