Folk Singer Guitarricadelafuente Makes Acting Debut in Spain's Oscar Pick

Spanish folk artist Guitarricadelafuente has never acted before. His first role is in La Bola Negra, an epic gay drama that spans nearly a century, The Hollywood Reporter reports.

The 29-year-old was born Álvaro Lafuente Calvo. His stage name combines his surname with a Spanish diminutive that means "small guitar."

In the film he plays Sebastián, a village trumpeter forced to defect to the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War. He is assigned to guard Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, a Republican prisoner of war played by Miguel Bernardeau.

The film is drawn from Alberto Conejero's play La Piedra Oscura, which was inspired by an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca, also called La Bola Negra. The title refers to a black ball, a vote of rejection that a young gay man in Granada receives when he tries to join a social club.

Guitarricadelafuente also wrote and performs the original song "La Nieve," which plays in the film's climactic sequence. He co-wrote it with Raül Refree, and it was submitted in the Oscar race for Best Original Song, the category for music written for a film.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where its directors, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, won the best director prize. Calvo also stars in the movie. It later won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Spain's Academia de Cine chose the film as the country's entry for the 99th Academy Awards, with the announcement made on 16 September 2026, according to El País. Netflix acquired North American rights to the film and launched an awards campaign. That campaign includes the ensemble cast, among them Penélope Cruz.

The U.S. theatrical release began on 16 October 2026. The Hollywood Reporter says the film opened with the second-highest per-screen average of any non-English-language movie ever. Per-screen average means the total ticket takings divided by the number of cinemas showing the film, so it measures how strongly each screen performed rather than the overall total. The film is set to expand in theatres over the following month and a bit more, before its Netflix streaming debut on 2 December.

The trade paper calls it a buzzy Oscar contender. For a Spanish-language drama with a songwriter-actor in his first screen role, that is a long way from a folk stage.

Netflix has not announced any further release dates beyond the December streaming debut, and no further awards categories have been confirmed.