Winner of the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, La Bola Negra – the new film from Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, collectively known as Los Javis – is a staggering cinematic tapestry. It functions as a speculative adaptation of a famously incomplete 20th century literary work, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age drama set at the height of the Spanish civil war and a sprawling maximalist epic of queer representation and acceptance spanning more than 80 years.
La Bola Negra takes its cues and title from an unfinished play by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, which he began shortly before he died in 1936, aged 38. In Lorca’s first work with an overtly homosexual protagonist, the surviving excerpt describes how a wealthy young man is refused membership to a prestigious Granada casino due to his sexuality. The board uses white and black balls to tally votes, resulting in the man being literally blackballed.
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