The Exiles

MacKenzie’s elegy to Los Angeles’ lost Bunker Hill district and the Native Americans who lived there premiered to great acclaim at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. It highlights one night in the lives of three exiles from a Southwestern reservation—portrayed by three nonactors playing themselves—driving, partying, and seeking a new life in new surroundings. The film provocatively brings to life the sense of rootlessness and disconnection of youth in the early 1960s with stunning black-and-white cinematography. A “precious document of a vanished culture” (Time), The Exiles is presented in a recently rediscovered, newly restored 35mm print. 1961, 35mm, 72 minutes.