A.V. Rockwell
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One Step Ahead: Chinonye Chukwu Interviews A.V. Rockwell on A Thousand and One
The ever-changing landscape of New York City is the captivating, challenging backdrop of A Thousand and One, writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut. Chronicling a mother and son’s loving yet fraught relationship from 1993 through 2005, the film incorporates speeches and news reports detailing specific policies of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg across two decades, a device that serves as a concrete reminder of time passing and stakes rising for the film’s protagonists. Strict jaywalking laws, the advent of stop-and-frisk and increased gentrification initiatives become tangible perils that the Harlem-based characters must navigate, lest they lose the freedom they’ve worked […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 16, 2023 -
Trailer Watch: A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One
Featured on our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2019, A.V. Rockwell‘s directorial debut A Thousand and One is set to hit theaters next month. The film had its world premiere at Sundance in January, where it won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize. Teyana Taylor stars as Inez, a single mom whose first objective after being released from Rikers is reuniting with her six-year-old son Terry, who has been placed in the foster care system. With no legal alternatives, Inez kidnaps Terry and utilizes her Harlem-based support system to lay low and begin anew. Over a decade later, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 23, 2023 -
“I Was Drawn to Harlem as a Character and How Gentrification Was Also an Antagonist”: DP Eric Yue on A Thousand and One
A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut A Thousand and One begins with Inez (Teyana Taylor) migrating between shelters during an intensely hot summer in ’90s-era New York City. Her 6-year-old son Terry is in foster care, and she makes the bold decision to kidnap him and discreetly live together again in Harlem. Years pass, and Terry (Josiah Cross) has grown into a shy but precocious teenager. However, the secret that the Inez has kept for a decade threatens to be revealed, meaning that the life she has built with her son could crumble at any moment. Cinematographer Eric Yue talks about how […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 2, 2023 -
A.V. Rockwell
It could be some kind of paradise, The Edward R. Mill School for Boys. The landscape is green, near tropical, lush — for the traumatized lost boys in this relatively unsupervised natural environment, a place to claim as their own. But A.V.Rockwell’s trenchant, astonishingly accomplished short, Feathers, is not about the replication of uncritical transcendentalist tropes. Against scenes of the school’s newest student, Elizier (Shavez Frost), enduring hazing by the island’s other youth while flashing back to the memories of his father’s shooting death by police, Rockwell lays a nondiegetic soundtrack of urgent fundraising cold calls by the school’s headmaster […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019
