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 USC and it was first threatened with demolition. He also became fascinated with a subculture of Arizona Indians living there, and made them the subject of a semi-documentary short feature he called The Exiles. Filming in 35mm, MacKenzie wasn't able to record dialogue on location, so he relied on post-synchronized dialogue and meditative voiceovers to tell his story of a long Friday night, from dusk to dawn. It is a night full of loneliness and yearning, petty betrayals and disappointments, and little flashes of happiness, ending with an attempt to revive old ceremonies and solidarities on a hilltop above the city. The Exiles is a wrenching document of cultural dislocation and a remarkable record of a city that has vanished. In the late 1950s, it was still possible to think that all elements of society could share downtown Los Angeles. Since then, Los Angeles has become more segregated, and its downtown has been remolded over and over in efforts at gentrification that have never quite taken hold. The unassimilated, although pushed more and more to the margins, have continued to uphold their claims to its space.