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'''The Exiles''' (1961) is a documentary film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something-year-old Native Americans who left reservation life in the fifties to live in the now non-existent Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, California, which was known at the time for being something of a slum but has been romantically immortalized in the literary works of 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 Cassavetes and 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 2007 releases (Killer of Sheep is in the midst of its premiere theatrical run, The Exiles is still in the pre-distribution stages).
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 LA 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 thoroughly obsessive 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 2007 theatrical release may provide the opportunity to redeem this fact.

Contents

Cast

Production crew

Additional crew

External links

Cast

★ Yvonne Williams

★ Homer Nish

★ Tommy Reynolds

★ Rico Rodrigues

★ Clifford Ray Sam

★ Clydean Parker

★ Mary Donahue

★ Eddie Sunrise

★ Jacinto Valenzuela

★ Ann Amiador

★ Delos Yellow Eagle

★ Louis Irwin

★ Norman St. Pierre

★ Marilyn Lewis

★ Bob Lemoyne

★ Ernest Marden

★ Frankie Red Elk

★ Chris Surefoot

★ Sedrick Second

★ Leonard Postock

★ Eugene Pablo

★ Matthew Pablo

★ Sarah Mazy

★ Gloria Muti

★ Arthur Madrull

★ Ted Guardipee

★ Ned Casey

★ Jay Robidaux

★ I.J. Walker

★ Julia Escalanti

★ Danny Escalanti

★ Della Escalanti

★ Tony Fierro

Production crew

★ Written, Produced and Directed by Kent MacKenzie

★ Cinematography by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, John Morrill

★ Production by Ronald Austin, Sam Farnsworth, John Morrill, Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, Beth Pattrick, Sven Walnum, Paula Powers

★ Additional Photography by Sven Walnum, Nicholas Clapp, Vilis Lapenieks.

★ Archive Photographs by Edward Curtis

★ Editing by Kent Mackenzie, Warren Brown, Thomas Conrad, Erik Daastad, Thomas Miller, Beth Patrick

★ Music by Anthony Hilder, The Revels, Robert Hafner, Eddie Sunrise

★ Sound by Sam Farnsworth

★ Sound Effects Edited by Thomas Conrad

Additional crew

★ Marvin Walowitz

★ Lawrence Silberman

★ Stuart Hanisch

★ Mindaugus Bagdon

★ Charles Smit

★ Judy Bradford

★ Ken Nelson

★ Ron Honthaner

★ David MacDougall

★ James Christensen

★ Stanley Follis

★ Ramon Ponce

External links

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