The Exiles

Kent MacKenzie's 1961 film covers one night among a group of young Native Americans living in Los Angeles. All have left their own land for the city and are staying in cheap apartments in the Bunker Hill district. The film begins in the evening and runs until morning: the women go to the cinema, the men move from bar to bar, there is gambling and a fight, and the night ends with drumming on a hill. It builds no incident, showing instead what rootlessness in a city is like. The performers are people who actually lived there and the speech was recorded first and laid over the images afterwards, which gives the sound a strange distance. The film went unseen for many years and only re-entered circulation when it was rediscovered in the 2000s. Who it's for: viewers who like independent cinema and fiction close to documentary. Who it's not for: anyone expecting narrative; the film is one night and nothing more.