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Explore the latest developments concerning ‘La Bola Negra’.

This Epic New Movie Is Considered The Odyssey’s Rival for Best Picture. I’m Not So Sure.

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La Bola Negra, a timeline-hopping epic about three queer men in different eras of Spanish history whose stories overlap and inform one another in unexpected ways, is an overstuffed but intermittently enthralling meditation on the intimate links between fascism and homophobia, as well as a study of the way repression and state violence damage not just the lives of individuals living under those systems but the emotional legacies they pass down for generations to come. The film’s co-directors and co-writers, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (former romantic partners, they bill themselves collectively as “Los Javis”), who won Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for their work on the movie, have previously made only one feature film, the low-budget musical comedy Holy Camp!, though they have also collaborated on several successful queer-themed projects for Spanish television. With La Bola Negra, the Javis take a huge leap forward in terms of both ambition and production. While not every one of its interweaving stories lands with equal power, this two-hour-and-40-minute film has the sweep and audacity of a great modernist novel. It’s hard not to admire the courage and energy with which it keeps asking big philosophical and moral questions, even when the answers to those questions remain vague (or, on a few occasions, painfully clunky).

Sex, Love and War: How the Racy Gay Epic ‘La Bola Negra’ Could Win Netflix’s First Best Picture Oscar

For Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau, the romance that fuels “La Bola Negra” wasn’t the challenge.

“It wasn’t hard to fall in love with him,” Bernardeau says, looking at his co-star. The two men, both 29-year-old Spaniards, haven’t tired of one another yet, despite a global tour that began in Cannes this spring and has now brought them to New York. “It was hard to create war.”

Those two forces, love and war, coexist painfully in what may be the most ambitious film of this year’s Oscar season. Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the two-man team known as Los Javis, “La Bola Negra” depicts the lives of multiple gay men in Spain over three separate timelines: In 1932, young Carlos (Milo Quifes) is blackballed — hence the film’s title — from a social club over his sexuality. In 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Guitarricadelafuente and Bernardeau play, respectively, a soldier and the prisoner of war he must guard, as their affections blossom inexplicably across political lines. And in 2017, historian Alberto (Carlos González) struggles to figure out how the two preceding tales intersect, stumped until an academic (Glenn Close in a brief, striking cameo) steps in to help.

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