The Bowtie Project will host the closing nights of the Ambulante California Documentary Film Festival with the Echo Park Film Center’s The Sound We See: A Los Angeles City Symphonyfollowed by Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) on Friday October 3rd.

In the fall of 2010, youth from across Los Angeles, ages 11–19, banded together with the Echo Park Film Center to document the life, rhythm, and movement of the city from their unique perspectives, joining their visions to create a complete 24-hour city symphony called The Sound We See: A Los Angeles City Symphony. The filmmakers divvied up the day into its two-dozen hours, working in pairs to select and shoot locations that best represented each hour of the day (and night) as one minute of film. The result is a spectacular 24-minute trip through the City of Angels as most have never seen it before. The Echo Park Film Center (EPFC) is a non-profit media arts organization committed to providing equal and affordable access to film/video education and resources.

From Dennis Lim for the NY Times: “The Exiles is a film about American Indians living on the edge of downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s, is both a chronicle and a casualty of neglect: a movie about a forsaken community that itself became a lost object. Directed by Kent Mackenzie, a first-time filmmaker who had just graduated from the University of Southern California, it is a poetic and empathetic hybrid of fiction and documentary. The nonprofessional actors play versions of themselves: young Indians, newly relocated from reservations and adrift in working-class Bunker Hill.” Shot in 1958 and completed in 1961, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles fell into obsecurity following a failure to be picked up for distribution after a successful premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the early 60’s. It was Thom Andersen’s compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself which kicked off the rediscovery of this lost masterwork.The Exiles was reestored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2008 and was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2009. (Runtime 72 minutes)