LA BOLA NEGRA
La bola negra by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi: the impossibility of communicating
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Spanish actors, showrunners, and queer icons, forged their popularity with the series Paquita Salas (2016), Veneno (2020), and La Mesías (The Messiah) (2023). La bola negra, their first feature film in Competition, is an ensemble film haunted by Federico García Lorca and adapted from La Piedra Oscura by Alberto Conejero. It follows three men in three different eras of divided Spain: 1932, 1937, and 2017.
In La bola negra, communication breaks down. There are missed video calls, a hand hovering over an intercom, and silences that last too long. For the directors, this impossibility is the heart of the film. Violence is not always found in what we do, but in what is left unsaid.
The film spans three different time periods and follows three men united by desire, suffering, and heritage. In 1930s Spain, Sebastián is a Republican soldier who loves Rafael, Federico’s historical lover. In 2017 Madrid, Alberto tries to heal a broken family despite his mother’s (Lola Dueñas) resistance. These two stories are not linked in the classical, narrative sense, but they embody the same ageless inability to talk. “We don’t pay enough tribute to the fight these previous generations of gay men had to wage, to how they were silenced,” the directors emphasize. Repression changes face across eras, but its mechanism remains the same.
These two Javiers, the “Javis” as they are known in Spain, shot the work from Northern to Southern Spain, in natural scenery, under all weather conditions. La bola negra is the story of a culture, a landscape, and a collective memory. Alongside a cast of young Spanish actors, Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close make sure the message is strong.
The movie is not about Federico García Lorca, one of the greatest Spanish poets, but the writer — who was shot at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War — haunts this work from beginning to end. It is the directors’ greatest wish to inspire a younger generation to run to a bookstore and buy all of García Lorca’s works and devour these precious volumes one at a time.
