The Black Ball: an operatic journey through Spain’s queer histories

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival 

The Black Ball (La Bola Negra) earned Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi the Best Director award at Cannes 2026, ex aequo with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland – deservedly so. Their film displays the colourful and baroque intricacies of a Fabergé egg, and inside, you’ll find ‘The Black Ball’, an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca that was the duo’s source of inspiration.  

The skilfully-crafted film intertwines three stories and timeframes – 1932, 1937 and 2017 – wrapped around the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and a history of political and homophobic persecution. The first story, set in Granada before the outbreak of the war, recreates the outline of Lorca’s original play: the attempt of a young gay man, Carlos (Milo Quifes), to be accepted into the city’s exclusive men’s club. The club does indeed exclude him, voting him out with the roll of several black balls in a theatrically staged ballot session. 

The second story, set during the War, revolves around two men: one, Sebastián, is a soldier of the right-wing Nationalist army that would enforce decades of dictatorship in Spain; the other, Rafael, the prisoner he is watching, is a member of the Republican army, loyal to the left-wing government. They are played respectively by musician and first-time actor Álvaro Lafuente Calvo (known as Guitarricadelafuente) and Miguel Bernardeau; the two men’s doomed love story, linking past and present, is the film’s most dramatically charged strand. 

Rafael, we come to realise, is the real-life Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, a member of Lorca’s theatre group La Barraca and the writer’s lover. He was executed in 1937, a year after Lorca himself was murdered by the right-wing military authorities in Granada. Rafael’s last days were reimagined in a stage play by Alberto Conejero, La Piedra Oscura, who co-signs the film’s screenplay with Calvo and Ambrossi. 

Embracing the Matryoshka doll structure of a play within a play, the writing-directing-producing duo, popularly known in Spain as Los Javis, then add another layer: the contemporary perspective of a 2017 playwright and historian. Played by newcomer Carlos González, Alberto is researching the traces of repressed queer culture in Spain. He is also Sebastián’s grandson, which leads him to unearth a family inheritance greater than he could have bargained for – a discovery applauded by an American academic, Isabelle, played by Glenn Close.  

The Black Ball weaves its three narratives with an operatic gusto very distant from the powerful austerity of Carlos Saura’s Lorca-inspired flamenco musical Blood Wedding (1981). Los Javis dial up the dramatic extravagance through free-flowing expressionistic imagery, from an early scene in which Sebastián flees to safety by climbing a demolished statue of Saint Sebastian in a bombed church, through to a homoerotic seaside moment of fascist soldiers relaxing naked on a beach and a climactic and unexpected dream snowscape. The sailors we see basking in Granada’s golden hour could easily have stepped out of Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) or a Jean-Paul Gaultier ad – the directors have said they were in fact inspired by Lorca’s drawings. But The Black Ball’s strengths lie less in a realistic depiction of history than in the emotional excess of classic melodrama to honour the past and its victims. So be it if dates of family history don’t quite add up in the film’s contemporary segment and so be it if eyebrows are raised by the directors’ audacity in imagining how Lorca would have ended his play. 

The film is at its most powerful when Los Javis let go and embrace their story, taking Lorca, the Civil War and assorted film allusions for a spin, whether it’s in a 1930s bar swooning with flamenco or giving Penélope Cruz the stage as a cabaret entertainer for the Nationalist troops. A flamboyant show stealer, Cruz echoes her character in Fernando Trueba’s 1998 The Girl of Your Dreams and her prominent position in Pedro Almodóvar’s legacy of queer imagination and celebration. The casting of another Almodóvar regular, Lola Dueñas, as Alberto’s damaged, mercurial mother is surely no accident either. 

As queer filmmakers, Los Javis have made no secret of the generational handover from Almodóvar, one of the producers here. The duo are already prominent media figures in Spain thanks to several successful TV series, notably La Mesías and Veneno, as well as their 2017 debut feature, musical comedy Holy Camp!. With its exuberant revisionist take on 20th-century national history, The Black Ball may well transform Calvo and Ambrossi from Spanish household names to international auteurs on the rise.