The Black Ball (La Bola Negra) was the Cannes competition debut for Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish duo known as Los Javis and best known abroad for the series Veneno and La Mesías. It is their first feature since 2017, and it arrived loud: the premiere on 21 May drew a standing ovation that ran somewhere between 16 and 20 minutes depending on whose count you trust.
The film traces three gay men across three eras, 1932, 1937 and 2017, braiding together desire, loss, and what one generation hands down to the next. The title refers to an old form of rejection, a black ball dropped into a voting urn to bar a young gay man from a club in Granada. The screenplay draws on the four surviving pages of an unfinished novel by Federico García Lorca, written before the poet was murdered by Nationalist forces in 1936, alongside Alberto Conejero's play La piedra oscura. Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente leads the cast in his screen debut, with Glenn Close in a supporting role and Penélope Cruz in an extended cameo.
At the awards ceremony, Los Javis shared the Best Director prize, and the film reportedly earned the longest ovation of any competition title this year.
Why it matters
The ovation translated into money. Neon, A24 and Mubi all circled the US rights before Netflix closed the deal, reportedly around $5 million. That a Spanish-language arthouse film set partly in 1930s Granada could spark that kind of fight says something about where the appetite is right now, and it was the second bidding war of the festival after A24 paid $17 million for Jordan Firstman's Club Kid.
There is also the Lorca of it. Bringing the poet's last unfinished work to the screen 90 years after his murder, as a queer epic spanning most of a century of Spanish history, is the kind of cultural gesture that gives a film weight beyond its festival buzz. Cruz, whose role is small, framed her involvement as a vote for the film's message rather than her screen time, and revealed she finished her scenes after being cleared following a health scare during production.
The Black Ball opens in Spain on 2 October through Elastica Films, with Le Pacte handling France. Netflix takes the US.
About this film
