The Exiles

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 semidocumentary 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.