Romancero Books with the support of the Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs of the Spanish Embassy in London, AC/E Programme for the Internalisation of Spanish Culture presents the VI London Festival of Queer Spanish Culture
Film Screening
Juana La Lorca by Valeriano López, followed by a Q&A with Jorge Gárriz
Synopsis
Juana la Lorca (2021) is an unclassifiable film by Granada-born artist and director Valeriano López, one that slips freely between comedy, musical, performance and mockumentary. The story follows Juan Moreno, a Roma drag performer from Granada's Sacromonte, who has always despised Federico García Lorca for his stereotyped depiction of the Roma people. After an unsettling dream centred on Lorca's poem "Son de negros en Cuba," Juan begins to feel an inexplicable identification with the poet's work — one that grows so intense it gives rise to a new, explosive persona: Juana la Lorca. Under this new name, he embarks on a journey full of misadventures and startling revelations that shed unexpected light on the life and death of Federico García Lorca.
With this singular, irreverent work — five years in the making — López humorously reclaims the homosexual, defiant dimension of García Lorca, while delivering a merciless satire of Lorquian clichés and the "industry" built around the poet's legacy. Blurring the line between fiction and documentary through Juan Herrera's performance as Juan/Juana, the film has been described as a kind of drag Don Quixote — a "lorcura" (a play on Lorca and locura, madness) that approaches the poet without reverence, seeking not to enshrine him but to befriend him. Since premiering at the Málaga Film Festival in 2021, where it also won the Jury Prize at the Casares Film Festival, Juana la Lorca has toured numerous festivals and cities, offering audiences a joyful, unruly way of reclaiming a Lorca far removed from the sanitised image so often built around him — fitting company for a festival dedicated to honouring the poet on the 90th anniversary of his death.
Bio
Valeriano López
Valeriano López is a multidisciplinary visual artist, video creator, filmmaker and screenwriter based in Granada. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Granada and trained in the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba). He began his career working with tapestry before turning fully to video and performance in the early 1990s. In 1996 he made his mark with the animated short Estrecho Adventure, winning numerous national awards and screening at festivals across Spain and internationally.
Since then, his work — spanning video installation, performance, theatre and film — has consistently explored questions of identity, migration, multiculturalism and the idealisation of the exotic, often approached through irony, satire and a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction. Notable works include the exhibitions Aldea Fatal (1999) and Granada de mano (2006), the video installation Nadivlo et on Sonisesa Sut, staged at the Casa-Museo Federico García Lorca in Huerta de San Vicente (2020), and the play La gitana superdotá (2015–16). His best-known feature film, Juana la Lorca (2021), has screened at festivals including Málaga, the Festival Nuevo Cine Andaluz de Casares, RIZOMA and the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival. Described by some as more an artist working in cinema than a filmmaker in the conventional sense, López continues to build a body of work defined by its iconoclasm, humour and refusal to respect institutional or artistic boundaries.
Film is Spanish with English Subtitles.
Check the Festival's website to know about our other events:
https://www.romancerobooks-store.co.uk/vi-lfqsc-fcqel-2026