"The Exiles" of the title are displaced Native Americans, living in late 1950s Los Angeles on Bunker Hill, a depressed area connected to the rest of the city by the Angels Flight trolley. The Indians were already exiles, from the moment they lost their ancestral lands and were confined to reservations. Starting on Friday afternoon and closing Saturday morning, the film follows pregnant Yvonne, her husband Homer, and their Mexican acquaintance Tommy Reynolds. Yvonne cooks dinner, Homer and Tommy drop her off at an "all-nite" movie and go to a bar, where they join a group on a joyride out to a hill--Hill X--and drunkenly greet the morning with tribal songs and dancing, while Yvonne sleeps in her neighbor's bed. A beautifully photographed slice of down-and-almost-out life, this is a portrait of women and men who are depressed over their diaspora, poverty, loneliness, alienation, lack of education and opportunity, and trying to escape the grip of a durable Los Angeles nightmare.