'A Thousand and One' has already received plenty of praise and a big accolade: the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. beastobsessed speaks to writer and director AVRockwell ahead of its theatrical premiere on March 31.
, the Black characters constantly feel unwanted and unsafe. Did your previous film have any influence on making this one?] that was my love letter to Black men and boys. But I think, as I was coming out of that, I started to reflect, “Well, who’s done something like that for us [women]?” It’s not like I could think of a number of examples of Black filmmakers making that ode to Black women, as fully seeing us and fully having empathy for what our experiences are in the world.
Was there something about the dynamic between Black mothers and sons, or Black men and women more broadly, that made youWhen it comes to the mother-son relationship, I was talking about it more in a universal way. So much of this movie does relate to dynamics between Black men and women. But the mother-and-son [relationship]—it’s for all mothers and sons.
It’s incredibly important. I feel like I couldn’t narrate the story in the right way without that part being included because, over the course of the movie, you see her showing up for everybody. You see how hard she fights for everyone, how dedicated she is. But she never fully gets that in return. And I think women can relate to that across the board.
No. We didn’t know each other prior to this. Her name came up a few times early on. But I hadn’t seen a lot of examples of her as an actress or enough examples of what she can do. It’s a very demanding role. So the idea was thrown out, but I kind of overlooked it initially. Bigger than I thought because I lived in New York all my life. And I also lived in Harlem for a number of years. And so I had a strong sense of how I wanted to go about capturing the city in order to be able to use what was there and just build on top of that, which we did. But I think what made it enormously more challenging was creating this movie in the middle of COVID. We had to make sure that it was a safe set. It ate up, like, a million dollars alone out of the budget.
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