“All your memories will disappear when you die, but objects will stay,” says Javier Ambrossi.
That idea sits at the heart of La Bola Negra.
Federico García Lorca was murdered in 1936 before he could finish the play that gives Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s latest film its name. Only four pages survive. Nearly 90 years later, those pages have become part of an ambitious, sprawling film about three gay men living across three different periods of Spanish history, connected by sexuality, desire, pain and the things one generation leaves behind for the next.
It is not an adaptation in any conventional sense.
Written by Calvo and Ambrossi alongside playwright Alberto Conejero, La Bola Negra also draws from Conejero’s La piedra oscura, itself inspired by the life of Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, Lorca’s final lover and the secretary of his travelling theatre company La Barraca. The film moves between 1932, 1937 and 2017, allowing real history, fiction and Lorca’s unfinished work to bleed into one another.
For Calvo and Ambrossi, what remains is almost as important as what has been lost.
“Art is the thing that we inherit,” Calvo says. “It helps us understand who we were, what we fear, what we love, what happened to us.”
It is also part of the reason they chose to shoot La Bola Negra on 35mm.
“There’s a physicality to art that we needed to convey,” he explains. “The movie exists as a physical object, and that was important for us.”
The four pages Lorca left behind are physical objects too. He may not have been able to finish the story, but somebody could find it decades later, read it and wonder where he might have taken it.
Ambrossi thinks about memory in much the same way.
“All your memories will disappear when you die, but objects will stay,” he says. “That’s the only way future generations know how the world was.”
“I think this movie is also about that, trying to understand the past so we don’t repeat what happened. Hopefully, people connect with that idea and want to learn more about Spanish culture, about Federico García Lorca and about queer stories, because every country has so many of them.”
There is something particularly powerful about that idea when talking about queer history, where so much of what survives has had to be pieced together from fragments.
Relationships went unnamed. Lovers became “friends.” People concealed huge parts of themselves because being honest about who they were could cost them their family, their freedom or their lives. Lorca himself was murdered at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, his remains never recovered, leaving behind an enormous body of work and an unfinished play with a gay man at its centre. Calvo describes his death as “the end of possibility.”
La Bola Negra is deeply interested in that possibility, in imagining the lives that could have existed and the stories that might have been told if history had been different.
Its three central narratives take place decades apart, but the characters find themselves wrestling with many of the same things: desire, shame, family, and the fear of saying something aloud when the world around you has taught you not to.
The inability to communicate is at the centre of the film: missed calls, silences held for too long, things people desperately need to say but cannot bring themselves to articulate. Repression changes throughout the decades, but the difficulty of truly making yourself understood remains.
And yet, for all the pain running through La Bola Negra, Calvo and Ambrossi were adamant that they did not want to make a film defined entirely by suffering.
“We know it’s a tragic story, and of course it’s full of tragic moments,” Ambrossi says. “But we wanted it to be uplifting towards the end, to give the audience the push they may need to live their lives, understanding how many people couldn’t, especially in the LGBTQ+ community.”
“We wanted to make it a vital movie.”
That distinction is important.
Queer history is filled with violence and loss, and La Bola Negra makes no attempt to shy away from either. But these people did not only suffer. They laughed. They fell in love. They desired one another. They made art. They found ways to enjoy themselves even when the world around them seemed determined to make that as difficult as possible.
Ambrossi points to Pedro Almodóvar as one of the people who taught them how tragedy and joy can exist alongside each other without one diminishing the other.
“I think we learned that from Pedro Almodóvar,” he says. “He can be deep in melodrama and suddenly find a moment of joy, maybe just one line or a secondary character who is funny.”
For Ambrossi, that is simply how life works. “You can be going through the biggest drama and suddenly someone in the background is doing the weirdest thing, and you’re like, ‘What is going on?’ That’s how the world really is.”
You can see that throughout La Bola Negra. Even during its darkest passages, Calvo and Ambrossi leave space for people to behave strangely, make jokes or simply be alive. Ambrossi points to the nurses working during the war, the off-screen conversations happening around characters in moments of enormous tension, Gollita when Alberto visits his grandfather’s town and, of course, Penélope Cruz.
“We wanted those moments of joy because it’s also a celebration of queerness,” he says.
It is a celebration that extends to the casting itself.
Calvo and Ambrossi deliberately looked for queer actors to inhabit many of the film’s queer characters, something Calvo has spoken about from personal experience after growing up as a gay actor and watching the opportunities available to him narrow as he got older. After seeing how much Veneno gained from casting trans women who understood those experiences from within, they wanted to approach La Bola Negra with a similar instinct.
At the centre of it all is Guitarricadelafuente.
The Spanish musician had never acted in a film before La Bola Negra. Calvo and Ambrossi did not particularly care. Asked what they saw in him, Calvo answers immediately: “The eyes.”
He laughs, quoting Scarface: “The eyes, chico. They never lie.”
Then he starts listing everything else: “His eyes, his magnetism, his shyness, his duende. He has something magical. He’s touched by the gods of creativity. He’s so special. The camera loves him. You want to put a camera in front of him.”
Ambrossi had seen it in his music videos long before they put him in front of their own camera. “You can tell he has something very special going on inside,” he says. “When you’re making a historical piece about the Civil War, you want someone who can remove the dust from everything.”
That last part was particularly important.
Historical films can sometimes feel preserved behind glass, populated by faces audiences have seen countless times before and weighed down by the importance of the period they are trying to recreate. Calvo and Ambrossi wanted Sebastián to feel alive.
“Having a new face that you’ve never seen before gives you freshness,” Ambrossi says. “We wanted the audience to look at his face and his eyes and ask, ‘Who is this guy?’ That’s what I wanted. He also brings a pop quality to the ensemble that we really, really enjoy.”
It proved to be one of the film’s most inspired choices.
Guitarricadelafuente has the kind of face that seems to carry an entire history before Sebastián has even said very much. There is a shyness to him, but also a sensuality and an interiority that makes you constantly wonder what the character is withholding. It is easy to see what Calvo means when he talks about the camera loving him.
Sebastián is a musician pulled into the Civil War and placed in a world built around violence and a very particular idea of masculinity. His encounter with Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a Republican prisoner placed under his watch, slowly forces him to confront feelings and desires he has never really been given the space to understand.
Using someone without the baggage of a screen career gives Sebastián an unusual immediacy. Guitarricadelafuente does not feel like an actor being transported into the 1930s. There is something raw and almost unknowable about him, and his lack of familiarity makes it much easier to believe we are meeting this person for the first time.
Calvo and Ambrossi had actually settled on him before the screenplay was finished. “We were already big fans of Guitarrica’s work,” Calvo has said. “He’s already telling a story when he’s singing.” Ambrossi went even further, saying that finding the right Sebastián became so central to the project that they eventually felt they could only make the movie if Guitarricadelafuente agreed to do it.
It makes sense that La Bola Negra, a film so concerned with what gets passed from one generation to another, would place such importance on bringing new faces into that history. There is an enormous amount of history surrounding the film, but Calvo and Ambrossi do not seem particularly interested in treating that history as something dead.
They shot on 35mm because they wanted the movie to exist as an object that could physically remain. The pair describe the film itself as “alive,” something that can be touched in the same way Lorca’s four surviving pages can still be touched nearly a century later.
Calvo and Ambrossi cannot recover those lives, nor does their film pretend that it can. But art can still leave something behind. A record of how someone lived, what they wanted, what they feared, or simply the proof that they were here at all. In Lorca’s case, even four unfinished pages were enough for someone else to pick up the story nearly a century later.
And sometimes, decades later, somebody else can pick them up and continue the conversation. “I think this movie is about trying to understand the past so we don’t repeat what happened,” Ambrossi says.
La Bola Negra is also about remembering that the people who came before us were not simply history. They were alive. They had desires. They loved people.
And, in many cases, they never got the chance to live those lives as freely as the generations that followed them.
For Ambrossi, remembering that should not leave audiences defeated.
It should make them want to live.
“We wanted to give the audience the push they may need to live their lives, understanding how many people couldn’t,” he says. “We wanted to make it a vital movie.”
La Bola Negra is now playing in theaters.
