‘La Bola Negra’ Is the Queer Epic Cannes Needed

A 22-minute standing ovation doesn’t lie. When La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) — the long-awaited feature film debut from Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known collectively as Los Javis — screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the response was the kind that careers are made of. It’s a sweeping, emotionally gutting, visually audacious queer epic that arrives at the world’s most prestigious film festival like something the cinema has been quietly waiting for.

And if that ovation is any indication, the wait was worth it.

The film weaves together three distinct storylines across three eras — 1937, 1932, and 2017 — with a structural confidence that makes the complexity feel effortless. In 1937, musician-turned-soldier Sebastián (played by singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente in his acting debut) survives an aerial attack on his village and is conscripted into the Nationalist fascist army, where he’s assigned to befriend a leftist prisoner named Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau, best known as a breakout from the hit series Elite) in order to extract information. What happens instead is a queer awakening — urgent, dangerous, and impossible to suppress. The film’s opening sequence alone, in which Sebastián climbs through the bodies of the dead using arrows from a felled sculpture as handholds, announces that you are in the hands of filmmakers who understand how to make spectacle feel sacred.

The 1932 timeline — fictional, and the source of the film’s title — follows Carlos (Milo Quifes), a young man whose confidence crumbles when he is blackballed from his father’s casino on the basis of rumors about his homosexuality. The title refers to the casino’s voting process: a white ball means acceptance, a black ball means rejection. That image of internalized shame takes on surreal, snow-drenched form in one of the film’s most striking sequences — a Sisyphean vision of what it means to carry rejection inside your body across a lifetime.

Then there’s 2017, where playwright-turned-record-collector Alberto (Carlos González) receives word that his estranged grandfather has died — a grandfather he thought had been dead for years. When his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas) reacts to the news with fury and tells him to stay out of the will, Alberto goes anyway. What he finds in a brown envelope becomes the connective tissue of the entire film: a physical and emotional inheritance that links all three stories across nearly a century.

A Love Letter to Federico García Lorca — and to Every Generation That Carried His Pain

At the heart of La Bola Negra is the ghost of Federico García Lorca, the poet and playwright murdered by fascists in 1936, and arguably the most important queer figure in Spanish literary history. The film is partly inspired by Alberto Conejero’s 2015 play La piedra oscura (Dark Stone) and by an unfinished work by Lorca himself, and his presence — his poetry, his fate, his capacity for love — haunts every frame.

“It’s a tribute to him,” Ambrossi said the morning after the premiere, “and I’m sure this makes it very special. When gay people and queer people watch La Bola Negra, I’m sure they’re going to connect and feel the truth.” He added that Lorca “is so modern” and expressed a hope that young audiences who see the film will go to bookstores afterward to discover his work — and to reckon with what happened to him. “He was killed very young by fascists,” Ambrossi said, “and that cannot happen again.”

The film’s central metaphor — the black ball of the title — extends beyond the casino scene into something more elemental. “There’s a physical inheritance in the movie, like the black ball Federico used as a metaphor, of our fear, the shame you have inside,” Calvo explained. “It’s something we feel we’ve inherited as gay men and LGBT people and queer people. There’s this black ball that comes through generations, and there’s something about that connection that talks about inheritance, talks about the art that survives through time. It’s about the inheritance of the shame and the pain and the black ball.”

That inheritance, and what we do with it, is what the film keeps returning to. Alberto’s 2017 storyline functions as a kind of reckoning — not just with his grandfather’s buried identity, but with the tendency of history to flatten the people who lived it. As Glenn Close’s character Isabelle, a historian, puts it: history is not about facts, but about the people who made those facts. “The work to remember,” she says, “is a way to avenge death.”

Why Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close Said Yes

The casting of two of cinema’s most iconic women in supporting roles was entirely intentional — and the stories of how it happened are almost as good as the film itself.

Cruz plays Nené, a singer-slash-performer in 1932 who delivers what one critic described as a showstopping cameo, schooling Sebastián on the then-nascent form of the modern transgender movement. The character grew out of a very Los Javis kind of dreaming. “If we’re making a war film, why don’t we get a cupletista, a Spanish singer from the ’30s who used to sing those really spicy songs?” Calvo recalled. “And then we kept dreaming. Couldn’t that be Penélope Cruz? And what is she going to do? She’s going to be a godmother who tells this kid you can be gay, you can be queer, you can be trans, you can be whatever you want because we were free in Madrid when we were young, and because of war, we are not anymore. So we kept dreaming until we had her.”

Close’s path to the film was equally unexpected. Calvo noted that there’s a long-standing phenomenon in Spain where it’s often foreigners who study and preserve Spanish and Hispanic history — because, as he put it plainly, “we don’t take responsibility for our history.” That observation shaped the decision to make the historian character American. As for Close specifically: she had already been a devoted fan of Los Javis’s Sundance-acclaimed series La Mesías. “So we sent her an email,” Calvo said. “When she replied, saying she would do anything we wanted because she was a huge fan of ours, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment.”

Ambrossi was clear that having Cruz and Close wasn’t just about star power — it was about reach. “We wanted to make a big movie. We had enough of this feeling that LGBT stories should be small because LGBT stories can talk to anyone in the world. We wanted to make it big, and to have Penelope is like a dream, because a lot of people will be like, ‘Oh, Penelope is there’ and will connect with the story also.”

A Statement Film, Not Just a Queer Film

The three lead roles — Guitarricadelafuente, Bernardeau, and González — are all played by openly gay actors, a deliberate choice that Ambrossi described as deeply meaningful even if not a hard rule. “I don’t think it has to be mandatory, but I think it’s very special when it happens,” he said. “Gay actors, they know how to express what it’s like to be rejected, what it’s like to be given the black ball in your life, and we wanted to do that.”

Behind the camera, the production was similarly intentional — built with a large contingent of LGBTQ+ crew members. “We tried to make a casting with gay actors, openly gay actors, and behind the cameras, with a lot of LGBT people, making a queer movie,” Ambrossi said.

The film is a superproduction in every sense: hundreds of extras, multiple locations, elaborate costume and production design that recreates wartime Spain and also stages large-scale surrealist sequences. It’s co-produced by Los Javis’s own Suma Content label alongside Movistar Plus, Los Esquiadores A.I.E., Le Pacte, and crucially, Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar’s El Deseo. The Almodóvar connection is more than logistical — the film carries his DNA in its use of melodrama, its convoluted algebra of desire, and its willingness to let the personal become mythological. One critic noted that Almodóvar himself attempted something similar in the closing scenes of 2015’s Parallel Mothers, his own tribute to the missing of the Civil War — and that La Bola Negra not only succeeds where he fell short, it takes the concept of romantic love to an entirely new level.

Ambrossi, asked about competing at Cannes alongside his mentor, was almost disarmingly humble. “I admire Pedro immensely. He is to me our great director, and he inspired me so much professionally but also personally as a gay kid. I don’t feel like I can even say we are competing with Pedro and Sorogoyen because they are better,” he laughed. “I look up to them.”

Spain is only behind France in the number of Palme d’Or contenders across the last two editions of Cannes, and Ambrossi is proud of what that represents. “What we are seeing is the result of several years of work and of continuous investment. These are the fruits of great labor, and I hope it continues for many, many years.”

As for La Bola Negra itself — it’s long, it’s ambitious, and it demands a lot from its audience. The cross-cutting between timelines is masterful more often than not, though the 1932 storyline occasionally feels less fully realized than its counterparts. Lorca’s poetry doesn’t always survive translation. And yes, at Cannes press screenings, the French and English subtitles were sometimes at odds with one another — a reminder that some things resist being carried across languages.

But none of that diminishes what Los Javis have built here. “This country has too many love stories buried in the fields,” one character says near the film’s end. La Bola Negra is, among many things, an act of excavation — and what it unearths is extraordinary.