The TIFF26 Film Review: Los Javis Turn Buried History Into a Visually Ravishing Queer Epic
By Ross
A tremor of violence cuts through the opening of La Bola Negra as bodies are blown apart during an attack, and what follows is one of the most visually arresting and emotionally overwhelming journeys I encountered at TIFF this year. Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known together as Los Javis, take the unfinished work of Federico García Lorca and build an ambitious, sweeping triptych about three gay men living through very different moments in Spanish history, binding their stories together through desire, persecution, memory and the need to tell the stories that have been buried and thought lost. The film moves from the Spanish Civil War to pre-dictatorship Spain and then into 2017, but its emotional architecture is constantly reaching across those decades, asking what happens to queer lives when fear, violence and silence are passed down through families and history. At 160 minutes, La Bola Negra demands a significant investment, but I found myself completely absorbed by the world Los Javis has created and never once questioned my emotional investment from beginning to end. It is a majestic work of art that can’t be missed.
That opening sequence belongs to Sebastián, played with remarkable vulnerability by musician Guitarricadelafuente in a stunning acting debut. Dirty young men are washed and prepared, looking toward the sky with the innocent anticipation of people waiting for something wonderful, only for that expectation to be shattered by a brutal attack. Sebastián runs for his life, climbing over the bodies of people he had known, then a broken statue of a saint pierced by arrows. There is a knowledge in his pained face that the people he believed would liberate him have turned their weapons on his community and brought destruction and death. The image is almost impossibly powerful, and Los Javis hold the frame long enough for the confusion and terror of the moment to register. Sebastián swims to safety, carrying the devastation of what he has witnessed with him. But it is his encounter with Rafael, a Republican prisoner of war played by Miguel Bernardeau, that opens up a story of desire, attraction, repression, and dangerous intimacy that will change everything, including literary history.
Then La Bola Negra shifts to 1932 and introduces the ethereal Carlos, played beautifully by Milo Quifes, whose presence is immediately striking as he walks through a sea of black suits dressed entirely in white. Carlos is wealthy, flamboyant, and openly poetic in his nature, yet he quickly learns that his stance can be crushed under the weight of the world when he is blackballed from his father’s exclusive casino because of rumours about his sexuality. Production designer Roger Bellés and art director Oriol Guardiola give each period its own decisive visual identity, while Gris Jordana’s cinematography turns those worlds into something sensual as well as oppressive. Some of the imagery surrounding Carlos carries the erotic charge of Tom of Finland and other iconic forms of queer imagery, with bodies, clothing, colour and composition creating a world where desire is always visible even when acceptance remains out of reach.
Thanks to the superb work of costume designer Ana López Cobos, the contrast between Carlos and the men surrounding him turns the social club into a world of rigid expectations and erotic violence, where a vote about membership becomes a brutal declaration about who belongs and who does not. Quifes gives Carlos an aching combination of confidence and vulnerability, particularly as his desire for acceptance collides with his anger toward a father who refuses to see the son standing before him. Gris Jordana’s cinematography makes the darkness of this world feel almost tactile and sharp, while the snowy mountains that surround his story give Carlos a kind of luminous, dreamlike beauty that makes his exclusion and exile feel all the more painful.
By the time the film arrives in 2017, Carlos and Sebastián’s stories have begun to reverberate inside our bodies, as Alberto, a young historian, played by Carlos González, tries to understand a fractured family history and the grandfather he never knew. His world contains the draw of hookup apps, nightclubs, and the constant electronic pings of contemporary desire, yet the film finds ingenious ways to connect those sounds to the black balls rolling through the casino of another era. It is one of the film’s most inventive ideas, allowing sound and image to become bridges between generations. The three stories continually fold into one another through music, photographs, literary fragments, and discoveries that force Alberto deeper into the history he has inherited. What begins as a reluctant search for family becomes an encounter with a buried queer history, and the discovery of a literary connection gives that inheritance another dimension.
The screenplay by Los Javis and Alberto Conejero, inspired by Lorca’s unfinished La Bola Negra and Conejero’s stage work La piedra oscura, turns literature itself into part of the film’s emotional architecture. Federico García Lorca, played by Alberto Cortés, becomes a dynamic presence connecting the different narratives, turning the writer’s own fate into part of the film’s conversation about art, desire and repression. When we hear of Lorca’s execution at the hands of fascists, the knowledge lands with particular force because his unfinished work has become part of this film, carrying fragments of desire and possibility that history tried to silence. Editor Alberto Gutiérrez gives the film a remarkable sense of movement between time periods, allowing a photograph, a sound, a gesture, or a piece of music to become a doorway into another era. The connections do not arrive as simple explanations. They gather gradually, like pieces of a story being recovered from the darkness, until Sebastián, Carlos, Alberto and Lorca begin to feel bound together in a conversation that history itself could never quite finish.
But it is the scale of La Bola Negra that is truly extraordinary, and Gris Jordana’s cinematography gives Los Javis the visual vocabulary to move comfortably between intimate human encounters and enormous historical violence. The film can fill the screen with snowy mountains, war-torn landscapes, and grand sequences of destruction, then draw us into a quiet exchange where a glance or an old man’s house can carry an entire history of fear and hidden desire. The score by Raül Fernandez Miró works alongside those images to create a film that often feels operatic, with music, movement and colour pushing the emotional intensity forward without losing the characters inside. Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close add to the dynamic with beautifully crafted performances moving around the leads, giving the film an electricity that deepens its emotional framing. Sometimes the film tips into melodrama and pushes its emotional intensity almost to the point of excess, but even during those stretches I found myself unwilling to look away or disconnect.
What makes La Bola Negra so affecting is the way its three stories turn history into something intensely personal and emotionally devastating. Sebastián is trying to survive a war and an internal conflict that seeks to destroy the assumptions of his young life. Carlos is fighting for the right to exist in a social world determined to reject him. Alberto is desperate to understand his family and the history that has been handed down to him, discovering that the past contains desires and truths that still need to be spoken aloud and understood. But it’s the film’s connection to Lorca that gives all three stories a deeper and more complex layering, because the literary legacy itself becomes something that strives to survive silence. Los Javis have created an epic film in which desire is never separated from danger, and memory is never simply an archive of what happened. It is something living, something that can be uncovered, shared, and carried forward.
The poetic heartbeat of La Bola Negra lies in those young men in that opening sequence, looking toward the sky and waiting for something they believe will bring them safety, only to discover the unjustified violence waiting for them. That image of climbing over a saint riddled with arrows takes on a deeper meaning as the film moves through its three eras, because Alberto inherits pieces of the lives that came before him and begins to understand what was lost, what was hidden, and what still needs to be spoken. Guitarricadelafuente, Milo Quifes, Miguel Bernardeau and Carlos González give those histories faces and bodies, and Los Javis give them a cinematic world filled with beauty, terror, music and desire. Yet ultimately, La Bola Negra is a film about people who refuse to let fear have the final word, and its most powerful act of resistance may be the simple act of allowing these lives, these loves and these stories to be seen.
