The Exiles (2008)

HOME AT LAST Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles, a docudrama of Native Americans in L.A. filmed in the late 1950s and unreleased until now, is a revelation

John Cassavetes is so revered as the founding father of independent film that it isn't widely known he had peers. One of them was Kent Mackenzie, who shot The Exiles, a ghostly and startling tale of Native Americans in Los Angeles — a fusion of documentary and fiction — in the late '50s. Never previously released, it's a revelation. Mackenzie follows a dozen lonely men and women through a night of drinking, wandering, and dreaming, and he touches something elemental: the temper of American life before people camouflaged their sadness in irony. The L.A. images are like Weegee photographs come to life. A-