Exiles, The

Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds

Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett present

A Milestone Film release

Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is a documentary film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski. The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects.

The film features Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds. The film shares a curious number of surface similarities with Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep: they were both gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized Los Angeles communities made within about a decade from each other by young filmmakers who were both compared to John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica, they both have existed for decades without theatrical release, they both have been featured in Thom Andersen's film LA Plays Itself, they both have been restored by Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archives and they both are Milestone Film & Video releases.

One of the significant distinctions between The Exiles and Killer of Sheep is that MacKenzie (unlike Burnett) was a definitive outsider to the community he was filming--he was a well-to-do white man from the East coast amongst Native Americans, Mexicans and Filipinos in a low-income L.A. community. Regardless, his sensitivity and his genuinely penetrating interest in attempting to understand the people in his film via filming them shines through (he, like Burnett, involved the stars of the film in the writing and filming process), curbing the tendencies towards sentimentalism and fetishization that often emerge in attempts to represent "the other." Despite (or because of) the fact that no other films at the time were (and still very few now are) depicting Native American peoples (aside from the overblown stereotypes in Westerns) let alone urban Native Americans, The Exiles could not find a distributor willing to risk putting it out theatrically, and so over the years it fell into obscurity, known and loved by cinephiles and admired for its originality and honesty by such Native American filmmakers as Chris Eyres (Smoke Signals, 1998) and Ben-alex Dupris (experimental filmmaker and writer) but remaining largely unseen to the public, including communities like the ones depicted in the film. The 2008 theatrical release will provide the opportunity to redeem this fact.

Bonus Features

Two short films by Kent Mackenzie, BUNKER HILL-1956 and A SKILL FOR MOLINA A history of the making of the film written by the director. And much more!

Reviews

“These Indians are exiles—from their broken society, their reservations, and themselves—and we feel it looking into their expressive, sad faces and hearing their musings on their lives…this film deserves the embrace of a film public hungering for original, homegrown independent films that tell us who we are.” — Marilyn Ferdinand, Bright Lights Film Journal “

Mackenzie lived only long enough to make one other feature, but this film’s lower-case urban poetry suggests a major talent… It can hold its own next to John Cassavetes' Shadows, which came out a year earlier….It has beautiful high-contrast black-and-white photography, a dense and highly creative sound track, and moving portraits, and it's refreshingly free of cliches and platitudes -- all the makings of an instant classic.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader