La Bola Negra tells the story of three men whose lives are intimately connected through desire, pain and inheritance, across three different eras – 1932, 1937, and 2017. Rich with Federico García Lorca's poetry and suffused with desire, grief and hope, it is an intimate love story and a sweeping exploration of memory, inheritance, and queer history, honouring those whose lives and loves were too often forced into silence.
The Garden Cinema View:
This decade-spanning epic draws together the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the work of Federico García Lorca, and the uneasy inheritance from this period for contemporary artists and historians. Entwined within the buried shame of the Pact of Forgetting, co-directors ‘Los Javis’ suggest, is a repressed lineage of queer storytelling and freedom that withered after Lorca’s appalling murder by fascists in Granada in 1936. This is now excavated and boldly brandished across three timelines in thrillingly melodramatic style (Lorca would be pleased). A tender connection between a Republic prisoner and an unwilling Nationalist soldier (a stand out film debut for musician Guitarricadelafuente) channels the sweep of The English Patient with the homoerotic charge of Beau Travail. A beautiful young gay man attempts to gain membership of a Kafka-esque casino in early 30s Granada. And a lapsed-playwright in 2017 ties the threads together with papers received from his recently deceased grandfather.
La Bola Negra paints its ambitious narrative in bold colours and strong emotions, with several dazzling set-pieces (including a soon-to-be iconic sequence featuring Penélope Cruz). Having already picked up the directing prize at Cannes, it is a serious player for the upcoming awards season.
