RECOMMENDED
Milestone Films, one of the most important distributors of gone-missing films from international film heritage, including “Killer of Sheep” and “I Am Cuba,” releases Kent McKenzie’s “The Exiles,” presented by Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie, a restoration of an almost-unseen 1961 fiction film in film-noir tradition, the story of Native Americans in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill District as they struggle during the Bureau of Indian Affairs “relocation period.” Glistening with bright light and darkening sorrow, the no-budget “Exiles,” indie decades before the slapdash label was applied to many an undernourished project, and a narrative based on extensive documentary research, plays out as a day in the life of several native Americans in their twenties who have left the reservation for the big city, and the result is mood and moment, anthropology and melancholy. The sound design is unusually strong and the general enterprise bears comparison to the early work of Cassavetes, as many reviewers have noted. 72m. (Ray Pride)
