The Exiles

October 8, 2008 12:00 am
Eddie Sunshine (left) singing on Hill X in Kent Mackenzie's THE EXILES (1961). Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie present a Milestone Films release. The film was restored from the original 35mm materials by Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Eddie Sunshine (left) singing on Hill X in Kent Mackenzie's THE EXILES (1961). Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie present a Milestone Films release. The film was restored from the original 35mm materials by Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

This forgotten 1961 indie is set largely in L.A.’s working-class Bunker Hill district, since razed for office towers. It’s a lost film in a lost neighborhood full of lost people; you can’t get much more forlorn than that. Shot over three years without location sound by Kent MacKenzie, the lovely black-and-white footage has the kind of vérité feel usually associated with documentaries, the French New Wave, or (during the same era of American cinema) Cassavetes. The Exiles is part documentary, part drama, as it follows three American Indians through one long, dark night of the soul. Screened three years ago at NWFF to considerable acclaim, the movie is essentially a film about hanging out; no mention is made of jobs and little of money. These are lives of suspension between night and day, work and idleness, the reservation and the city. Its sad subjects are in a kind of limbo, endlessly walking in a ghost world called Los Angeles. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

Oct. 10-16, 7 & 9 p.m., 2008