A sprawling gay love story, Federico García Lorca, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close and nearly a century of Spanish history might sound like quite a lot for one movie to carry.
La Bola Negra is giving it a go anyway.
The new film from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — better known collectively as Los Javis — tells the interconnected stories of three men living in Spain across three different periods: 1932, 1937 and 2017.
Their lives are separated by decades but connected through sexuality and desire, love, pain, inheritance and the legacy of Federico García Lorca. The film takes its title from one of Lorca’s final unfinished works and also draws on Alberto Conejero’s play La piedra oscura, according to the Festival de Cannes.
We are deliberately going to stop there.
Because La Bola Negra is structured around discovering how these lives connect, explaining much more would rather defeat the point of seeing it.
Three men, three generations
At the centre of the film are Milo Quifes as Carlos, Guitarricadelafuente as Sebastián and Carlos González as Alberto, whose stories unfold at very different moments in Spanish history.
Guitarricadelafuente makes his acting debut in the film, while Miguel Bernardeau plays Rafael. They are joined by a frankly rather formidable supporting cast that includes Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close and Julio Torres. The official Cannes listing details the principal cast and characters.
Lorca’s presence hangs over the entire story without turning the film into a conventional Lorca biopic. Instead, Los Javis use his unfinished work as part of a much larger story about gay men, desire, repression, memory and everything one generation leaves for the next.
Watch the trailer
So, could La Bola Negra actually make it to the Oscars?
This isn’t entirely wishful thinking.
Spain has officially selected La Bola Negra to represent the country in the Best International Feature Film race at the 99th Academy Awards. That does not mean the film has an Oscar nomination yet — it means Spain has chosen it as the country’s submission from which the Academy will eventually choose its shortlist and nominees. Movistar Plus confirmed the selection on September 16.
But the movie has already built the sort of festival résumé that makes the question worth asking.
It premiered in competition at Cannes, where Calvo and Ambrossi won the Best Director prize, shared with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland.
The film also picked up an Audience Award at the Sydney Film Festival earlier in its international run. Its distributor later listed Sydney among the audience awards collected by the film alongside Toronto and San Sebastián. Atresmedia has the festival tally.
At the San Sebastián International Film Festival, La Bola Negra won the City of Donostia / San Sebastián Audience Award with a score of 9.40.
Then La Bola Negra went to the Toronto International Film Festival and won the festival’s main People’s Choice Award. That particular prize has a conspicuous relationship with the Oscars: TheWrap notes that 16 of the 18 TIFF People’s Choice winners since 2008 subsequently received a Best Picture nomination. Five went on to win Best Picture.
Cannes gave it the directors’ prize. Toronto gave it the people’s prize. San Sebastián’s audiences followed suit. And now Spain has officially put it forward for Hollywood.
So yes, there are a few reasons people are starting to mention the O-word.
Where can you watch La Bola Negra?
La Bola Negra opened in Spanish cinemas on September 25 and will move to Movistar Plus+ following its theatrical run, where it will be available exclusively in Spain. Movistar Plus has the Spanish release details.
In Portugal, the film is scheduled to open in cinemas on November 5, according to Medeia Filmes.
Netflix has acquired the film for the United States and Canada. Its theatrical rollout begins in New York and Los Angeles on October 16 before expanding to additional cities. La Bola Negra then arrives on Netflix in the US and Canada on December 2. Netflix has published the full release plan.
Could queer cinema be back in the biggest Oscar categories?
Twenty years after Brokeback Mountain made a gay love story breaking into mainstream cinema feel almost shocking, it can sometimes seem as though LGBTQ+ rights — and attitudes towards queer people — have started moving backwards rather than forwards.
Could La Bola Negra be the latest glimmer of hope that unapologetically queer cinema can once again force its way into the Oscars’ biggest categories?
And, speaking as one gay man who reliably contributes to the Oscars’ very loyal queer viewership, there is one other extremely important question.
Are they finally going to give Glenn Close a competitive Oscar?
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