La Bola Negra: finishing Lorca’s unfinished work

SANTIAGO FOUZ HERNANDEZ explores La Bola Negra, a thrilling historical survey of changing Spanish attitudes to homosexuality

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DIRECTED by legendary Spanish film-making duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo – also known as “Los Javis” – La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) is Spain’s big hope for next year’s Oscars.

The film reimagines the unfinished 1936 work of the same name by the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), based on the only four existing pages. It would have been Lorca’s first play with a gay protagonist.

La bola negra is also co-written by Los Javis in collaboration with queer playwright Alberto Conejero, author of the original play La Piedra Oscura (The Dark Stone, 2013) on which the film is also partly based.

The film’s title refers to Lorca’s original story, in which Carlos, a young gay man (Milo Quifes) tries and fails to join a private club due to rumours about his sexuality. The selection committee votes in secret, using white and black balls. The black ones represent rejection – hence the term “blackballed” – and, implicitly, social exclusion.

Los Javis first became well known for three major streaming series: the hilarious Paquita Salas (Netflix 2020), a tragicomic story about a has-been talent agent; Veneno (HBO Max, 2020), based on the life of a trans sex worker who became a national celebrity in 1990s Spain; and the ambitious religious musical drama La Mesías (MUBI, 2023).

It is hard to believe that La Bola Negra is only their second feature, after La llamada (Holy Camp, 2017), their hugely successful musical about a lesbian romance. This new film is a significant leap in scale, production values and global reach.

After La Bola Negra’s triumph at Cannes, where Los Javis won best direction, the film also won audience awards at San Sebastian, Toronto and London, drawing full houses on the festival circuit. It also quickly became a social media phenomenon and has been acquired by Netflix.

Lorca, considered Spain’s most influential 20th-century poet and playwright, was executed by firing squad in 1936, at the start of the Spanish civil war, because of his politics and sexuality.

In the film, Lorca’s unfinished text is a seed that grows and expands into the 21st century, pausing at three moments in Spain’s history: the second republic in 1932, the civil war in 1937, and contemporary Spain in 2017, taking in three gay stories.

In the second story, based on Conejero’s play, Lorca’s real-life lover Rafael Rodriguez Rapun (Miguel Bernardeau) is a Republican prisoner of war. He develops a fleeting platonic infatuation for his Nationalist guard, Sebastian, played brilliantly by popular singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente in his first acting role.

Their connection becomes part of a complex chain of relationships and revelations that carries the story – and queer history – forward, aided by an enveloping score by Raul Refree and exquisite cinematography by Gris Jordana.

Lorca’s legacy runs through the film, explicitly through his unfinished play, his homoerotic sketches, and even his presence depicted in a small cameo (Alberto Cortes). More implicitly, it is evoked through the dramatic Spanish settings and the depiction of motherhood, a subject he examined extensively in his work.

Lola Duenas gives a remarkable supporting performance as Teresa, a troubled single mother. Penelope Cruz’s stellar performance as a glamorous cabaret singer includes one of the film’s most memorable lines, while Glenn Close plays an American Lorca scholar entirely in Spanish.

The film is packed with queer imagery across time. These range from a war-torn statue of the persecuted Saint Sebastian, who has become a contemporary queer icon, to hypermasculine sailor figures reminiscent of German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic homoerotic film Querelle, to the unmistakable gay dating app Grindr.

Shot on 35mm film, La Bola Negra seamlessly combines moments of great drama and intense intimacy in relatively small spaces that contrast with landscapes of epic proportions. Jordana’s lush cinematography gives the movie a consistent look throughout, while creating a distinctive ambience for each of the three story parts.

The film’s queer gaze embraces both ideals of masculinity and body diversity. Alongside the taut bodies of the characters played by heartthrobs Bernardeau and Guitarricadelafuente, the protagonist of the final section is Alberto, a larger-bodied gay man played by Carlos Gonzalez. Famous for his queer roles in streaming hits such as Veneno (2020), and Mariliendre (Fag Hag, 2025), Gonzalez delivers another standout performance, while adding important elements of body and sex positivity to the story.

Queer people have long been excluded from official histories: ignored, silenced or presented in ways that obscure their sexuality. In repressive societies, invisibility is a matter of survival, shaped by internalised homophobia and imposed closets. La Bola Negra makes that history visible, while celebrating the role queer people play in shaping culture: Lorca as a playwright, Sebastian as a musician, Alberto as a queer historian.

That reclamation has resonance in today’s Spain, a country often associated with LGBTQ+ progress. The third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage in 2005, Spain currently ranks first in Europe on the 2026 Rainbow Map for legal rights and protections, yet the political climate feels increasingly uncertain.

Francoist and fascist nostalgia is finding new audiences through social media, even among young people, and the possibility of a conservative and far-right coalition hangs over Spain’s general election on November 29. As cultural historian Nicholas Manganas has argued, the film’s return to Spain’s past feels strikingly connected to the present.

Lorca’s remains are still believed to lie in an unmarked mass grave in his native province of Granada. His unfinished manuscript, however, survives as a symbol of queer legacy and inheritance. In the film, its pages become a baton passed across generations. But they are also an emblem of reparation for the queer shame, represented in the film by the black ball of the title, and its symbolic weight in Lorca’s original 1936 story.

By bringing the Spanish poet and playwright’s story back to life through an predominantly queer cast in a production that is heavy with queer iconography, Los Javis make La Bola Negra part of the very legacy their film seeks to reclaim.

Santiago Fouz Hernandez is Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

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