Kent Mackenzie discovered Bunker Hill, the low-rent residential neighborhood on the west edge of downtown Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s, when he was a film student at the University of Southern California and the neighborhood was first threatened with demolition. He became fascinated with a subculture of Arizona Indians living there and made them the subject of the semi-documentary short feature The Exiles. Filming in 35mm, Mackenzie wasn’t able to record dialogue on location, so he relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voice-overs to tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn.