The Exiles

Neglected for decades prior to its re-release in 2008 as a co-presentation of writer Sherman Alexie and filmmaker Charles Burnett, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles recounts a day in the life of a group of Native American twentysomethings who have migrated from Arizona to Los Angeles. Set in Bunker Hill, or rather a version of the neighborhood that has long since vanished, the picture drifts from story to story, from bar to rooming house to streets humming with neon, and what gradually develops is a moving, quasi-documentary, and unprecedented treatment of urban indigenous youth culture, shot through with the sorrow of dislocation but also flashes of vibrancy. “Instead of leading an audience through an orderly sequence of problems-decisions-action and solution on the part of the characters,” Mackenzie explained, “we sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up.”