The Exiles
Overview
Los Angeles is home to the largest and most vibrant community of Native people in the United States. To honor the history of Bunker Hill and its importance as a landing place for Native peoples who left their reservations to start a new life in Los Angeles, The Broad is presenting a special screening of The Exiles (1961). The film chronicles a night in the lives of young Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill district, now a bustling artistic corridor on the edge of downtown Los Angeles and home to The Broad, MOCA, The Music Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and The Colburn School. Presented in conjunction with the special exhibition, Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, the film is based on interviews with the participants and follows them as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance. Thanks to UCLA Film & Television Archive’s magnificent restoration and Milestone’s release, this hidden gem finally captured the heart of the film world after rarely being seen for fifty years. The Exiles is gritty, realistic, beautifully photographed, and energized by a rock-and-roll score from Norman Knowles and The Revels.
There will be a post-screening conversation with Edgar García, Interim General Manager for El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument with over twenty-five years’ experience in cultural policy, arts administration, historic preservation, and urban planning and Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk), filmmaker, writer, and curator who is also Director of Sundance Institute's Indigenous Program and a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image.
Image Credit: The Exiles (1961, 72min, dir. Kent Mackenzie). Film licensed by Kino Lorber.
Tickets include access to The Broad, including Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me and our third-floor rotating collection galleries, through September 28, 2025.
Tickets to this event do not include access to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), and must be booked separately.
To learn more and plan your trip, visit Know Before You Go & FAQ. Visitor policies are subject to change.
Get TicketsBiographies
Kent Mackenzie
Kent Robert Mackenzie (b. 4/6/1930, d. 5/16/1980) was an English-American film director and producer who is mainly remembered for his film The Exiles (1961), about Native American young people in Los Angeles. After graduating from USC in 1956, Mackenzie began to hang around with a group of young Native Americans in downtown Los Angeles. He then asked them to collaborate on a film that would present a realistic portrayal of life in the community. Prior to The Exiles, Mackenzie made Bunker Hill (1956) while still a student at USC. The film centered on elderly pensioners and their community and the displacement they experienced because of a block of high-rise offices that was to be built there. His oeuvre of 17 films also includes The Teenage Revolution (1965), a look at six teenagers and their society and culture as well as their current lives while speculating about their futures, and Saturday Morning (1971), which involved a group of 20 teenagers being filmed over a period of a week.
Photo licensed by Alamy
Edgar García
Edgar García is Interim General Manager for El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument and has over twenty-five years’ experience in cultural policy, arts administration, historic preservation, and urban planning. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrants, he was raised in the communities of Lincoln Heights and Chinatown. A first-generation recipient of the Getty-Marrow program, he began his public service with the City of Los Angeles as Preservation Planner for the Office of Historic Resources, overseeing thousands of L.A.’s most cherished historic buildings and cultural sites. He went on to serve as Arts & Culture Deputy for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s administration. Awarded the Getty’s Leadership in Arts Management grant, he has served as a Fitch Scholar, Royal Oak Foundation Scholar, and a Diversity Scholar for both the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Historic New England, and he was named Pocantico Fellow with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He served on an ICOMOS–U.S. State Department diplomatic exchange leading architectural conservation projects. Selected for the European Union’s Global Cultural Leadership program, he is also a recipient of the German Marshall Memorial Fellowship and the Eisenhower Fellowship. He is a graduate of Yale University and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Photo courtesy of the speaker
Adam Piron
Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is currently the Director of Sundance Institute's Indigenous Program and he is also a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image. As a film programmer, he has served as a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Film Programming Team since 2013 and was also previously the Film Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and he has guest-curated film programs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF Lightbox, the Autry Museum of the American West, Metrograph, and various other film festivals and venues. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection's Current, MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope Magazine, the Metrograph Journal, and CNN.
Photo courtesy of the speaker
