The Head of Joaquin Murrieta / Truth Seekers

Dir. John J. Valadez - 2016, USA, 30 min.

The Head of Joaquin Murrieta is an insightful, irreverent and fascinating journey into the history of California that uses both fiction and documentary storytelling devices to tear open a painful and long ignored reality: the lynching of Mexican Americans in the southwest. In 1849, 19-year-old gold-miner Joaquin Murrieta blazed a four-year trail of revenge and rebellion following the theft of his land, lynching of his brother and the rape and murder of his wife by California settlers. The young Murrieta was killed by bounty hunters who cut off his head and displayed it across California in a jar, charging people a dollar to see their trophy, and enshrining Murrieta in California’s consciousness.

One hundred and sixty-two years later, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker John J. Valadez is convinced he has recovered the head, and together they embark on a quixotic, cross-country road trip through history, memory, and myth to bury the head of Joaquin Murrieta, and finally lay to rest a dark and troubled past, one that has chilling parallels with the filmmaker's own family story