Los Javis trace La Bola Negra to Lorca and Spain's unhealed past
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi say their drama La Bola Negra grew from a wound in Spain that has not healed in almost 90 years.
The pair, known together as Los Javis, spoke alongside Penélope Cruz at Deadline's Contenders London to explain the origins of the film, which follows the linked stories of three gay men in 1932, 1937 and 2017 Deadline. Cruz joined them for the conversation. The talk took place in London in the week ending 10 October 2026.
The project starts in the theatre. La Bola Negra takes its cue from Alberto Conejero's 2013 play La piedra oscura, which itself was inspired by an unfinished play of the same name by poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Conejero's play centres on the love story between footballer Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and Lorca during the Spanish Civil War.
Lorca never finished his version. Calvo and Ambrossi said it would have been his first play to include a gay character. Only four pages survive. The film-makers travelled to Granada to read the pages, which are kept at the Centro Federico García Lorca.
Ambrossi said the first page is simply a list of characters Lorca planned to use. That list became a blueprint for the film. It gave them names and starting points to build across three time periods.
Calvo described reading the opening monologue on a plane and crying. He said it touched something personal about his country and events 90 years ago. He called it a generational trauma passed down through families.
The cast spans those timelines. Cruz plays Nené Romero, a cuplé singer, a performer of a popular Spanish stage song, who entertains soldiers during the Civil War Deadline. Another strand follows a young trumpeter named Sebastián, played by musician Guitarricadelafuente.
The script was co-written by Calvo and Ambrossi with Conejero, and draws on Conejero's play, Lorca's unfinished text and other writings by Lorca, according to Netflix's Tudum Netflix Tudum.
What gives the production its festival profile is Cannes. Calvo and Ambrossi jointly won the Best Director Prize at Cannes 2026 for the film, shared with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland, while Fjord took the Palme d'Or Deadline.
La Bola Negra was then programmed in the BFI London Film Festival 2026, with a screening at Southbank at 21:00 on Thursday 8 October 2026 BFI.
