Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait

Dissidence is dangerous. That’s the message of the life and art of José Pérez Ocaña, better known simply as Ocaña, the queer painter, drag performer, and conceptual provocateur. In 1978’s Ocaña, retrat intermitent, documentarian Ventura Pons creates a portrait of a passionate and unstoppably transgressive force of nature who fled the small-town repression of rural Andalusia to take on the institutional oppression of post-Franco Barcelona. Ocaña’s paintings hang in galleries around the globe – in part due to how this film has allowed their reappraisal – but nowhere else can you drink in the glory of Ocaña’s drag walks down his adopted city’s most well-known promenade, La Rambla, events that were by turns lewd and joyful, clownish and glamorous, but always drew a captivated crowd. – Richard Whittaker