Producers: Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Lena Waithe, Rishi Rajani and Brad Weston   Director: A.V. Rockwell  Screenplay: A.V. Rockwell   Cast: Teyana Taylor, Josiah Cross, Will Catlett, Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, Terry Victoria Abney, Delissa Reynolds, Amelia Workman, Mark Gessner, John Maria Gutierrez, Adriane Lenox, Azza El, Alicia Pilgrim and Jolly Swag  Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: B+

Set against the backdrop of a changing New York City in the late nineties and early 2000s, writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature follows a mother’s determination to make a better life for her son despite the cards being stacked against her.  Anchored by a fiercely committed performance by Teyana Taylor, “A Thousand and One” combines a searing domestic drama and the larger socio-political context against which it occurs with skill and insight.

Inez (Taylor) is introduced in 1994, just having been released from prison.  Returning to her old neighborhood with plenty of attitude, she notices on the street six-year old Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) among a group of foster children, and approaches the wary boy, who recognizes her as his mother but has little to say to her.  Later he tries to escape his foster home and is injured while climbing out a window.  Inez visits him in the hospital, and, stunned by his accusation that she’d abandoned him, impulsively takes the child away with her. 

After spending some time with an old friend, Kim (Terri Abney) and her censorious mother (Delissa Reynolds), Inez finds her own place and makes a life for them, working as a cleaning woman while also relying on her skill as a hairdresser.  Knowing that both she and Terry could be in serious trouble if the authorities identified them—after all, he’s still a ward of the state, and she’s a kidnapper—she secures fake identity papers for them both.  Eventually they’re joined by her erstwhile boyfriend Lucky (Will Catlett), just out of prison himself, who’s not exactly thrilled about being a dad to a child who’s not his.  But despite his flaws—infidelity among them—he and Inez get married, and he takes on the responsibilities of husband and father, though he and Terry are never especially close.

Terry grows into a thirteen-year old (played by Aven Courtney) who pals around with loquacious Pea (Jolly Swag) and gets infatuated with Simone (Azza El), the clerk at a local diner.  Three years later, and now played by Josiah Cross, he’s still interested in her (Alicia Pilgrim), but she’s moving on to what she hopes will be a better place, and he has options as well.  His teacher (Amelia Workman) is impressed by his academic abilities and seriousness and recommends him for an internship.  But accepting it requires his providing a birth certificate and proof of identity, and when he offers the phony documents Inez has kept among her papers, it results in the revelation of secrets she’s been keeping from him—including one that will surprise the viewer as well as him–and compel you to see the story in any rather different light.  The notion of it taking a village to raise a child might just seem strikingly appropriate.

As the story of mother and son plays out with subplots that add texture—like Lucky’s falling seriously ill, and Inez dealing one of his mistresses and the woman’s child at his street wake—we watch the city changing around them.  Rockwell uses audio clips of speeches by Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg to illustrate the sort of change both politicians promise, and then shows the realities they actually bring—as in a brief scene in which Terry and Pea are accosted by cops implementing a “stop and frisk” mandate.  The culmination come when Inez’s new landlord Jerry (Mark Gessner) arrives with pledges of improvements to her apartment, only to use the work to make the place uninhabitable and force her out—the process of gentrification at work. One suspects that the title of the film refers not just to the street number of the building in which the apartment’s located, but to the fact that the tale we’re watching applies to a great many other locals as well.  (Curiously, while the archival footage used includes several shots of the Twin Towers, the events of 9/11 aren’t dwelled upon.)

Though Taylor is the heart and soul of “A Thousand and One,” her galvanizing performance always at the center of things, the three youngsters who play Terry bring warmth and nuance to the boy, and Catlett adds depth to a character the script refuses to treat in one-dimensional terms.  Among the excellent supporting cast, one might single out Gessner, whose smarminess represents phoniness at its worst, and Reynolds and Adriane Lenox as two older women whose demeanor indicates that they’ve seen how things are and are prepared for them take a turn for the worse at any time—versions of Inez in later life, as it were.

The sense of uncompromising realism is enhanced by the visually striking work of production designer Sharon Lomofsky, costumer Melissa Vargas and cinematographer Eric K. Yue, who eschew artsiness in favor of raw authenticity, and editors Sabine Hoffman and Kristan Sprague, who integrate the elements of wider context into the narrative strands effectively, though not without some jerky spots.  Gary Gunn’s music beautifully catches the moods of the neighborhood at the plot’s different time frames well.

“A Thousand and One” suggests the sort of work Lorraine Hansberry might have written were she alive today.  It’s an insightful, compelling work from a writer-director to watch, with a lead performance to match.

Producers: Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Paiskowska   Director: Jerzy Skolimowski   Screenplay: Ewa Paiskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski   Cast: Sandra Dryzmalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzulo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Tomasz Organek, Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako    Distributor: Janus Films/Sideshow

Grade: B+

There are plenty of human actors in Jerzy Skolimowski’s film—including French icon Isabelle Huppert, playing an ill-tempered countess—but they’re all doing support work for the title character, a donkey whose odyssey reveals the relationship, occasionally kind but often cruel or indifferent, between people and animals.  Loosely inspired by Robert Bresson’s “Au hazard, Balthasar” (1966) but forging a path of its own, ”EO” manages to be both a homage to Bresson’s film and a compelling new take on its trajectory. 

When EO (played by six animals—Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako) is introduced, it’s in a hallucinatory sequence bathed in red light.  It’s revealed that the donkey, called after its braying sound, is part of a circus routine in tandem with pretty Kasandra (Sandra Dryzmalska), who treats her partner kindly.  But EO’s also employed as a beast of burden by the circus, hauling refuse to a nearby junkyard.  The dual role is ended, though, when the circus is closed down—the result, it appears, of both financial difficulties and protests from animal rights’ activists.

EO is summarily relocated to a horse ranch, where the donkey, now just a beast of burden, watches the steeds pampered and well fed, and then after what might be either an accident or a sign of displeasure over unequal treatment, to a farm that also serves incidentally as a children’s zoo.  But then EO departs on an episodic adventure, surviving a forest full of hunters but falling afoul of hooligans who hold the beast’s braying the cause of their loss in a soccer game.  After stints in an animal hospital and a fur farm, EO is picked up by a truck driver (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) transporting horses to an unknown destination; that episode ends in violence, with EO falling in with a young man (Lorenzo Zurzolo).  He takes the donkey home to a palatial estate where it’s revealed that the man is an exiled priest seeking a reunion with his imperious stepmother (Huppert), with whom he shared an apparently amorous past.  But EO does not remain there: off again, the donkey winds up with a herd of cows in a location that will not be revealed here.

A degree of anthropomorphism is probably unavoidable in a film like this—we’re occasionally treated to flashes of EO’s memories, for instance, and on a couple of occasions EO practically does an eye roll when knocking over a trophy case at the horse ranch or clobbering a brutal overseer at the fur farm—but this is no cutesy Disney portrait.  One has to read feelings into the frequent focus on the animal’s face rather than having them telegraphed to you explicitly, though the contexts in which Skolimowski situates them necessarily affects the interpretation.

And those settings are often striking, enhanced by the extraordinary cinematography of Mychal Dymek (with additional footage shot by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert).  While most of the film is relatively naturalistic, an image of EO crossing a bridge against the backdrop of a waterfall is like a museum painting, and the forest sequence, shot through with red lasers from the hunters’ rifles and the noise of scurrying foxes, has a hallucinatory quality.  Elsewhere the film goes a surrealistic route: when the donkey is beaten, he turns into a robotic metal skeleton thrashing about bathed in red light.  And there are overhead shots from far above as the donkey trots through fields and along roads—as if a God’s-eye POV.

The humans whom EO encounters are an eclectic bunch.  Dryzmalska’s is certainly the character who empathies most with the animal, and is recalled with what appears to be affection, but the actress also invests her with a flightiness that overcomes the circus performer’s concern for her former partner.  The trucker played by Kościukiewicz gets a mini-drama all his own in which EO acts merely as an observer of human folly, while Zurzolo and Huppert enact an elliptical domestic drama that suggests deep undercurrents; no wonder the donkey elects to leave it hanging.  Miroslaw Koncewicz’s production design showcases cannily chosen backdrops for all the episodes, which have been been stitched together smoothly by editor Agnieszka Glińska.  Pawel Mykietyn’s score is evocative but spare and understated.

It takes courage to attempt a new take on a film many regard as a classic; it’s a challenge Skolimowski has embraced to remarkable effect.