Federico García Lorca is everywhere in "The Black Ball", but not exactly in the way one might expect. The film by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Los Javis, does not reconstruct the life of the Granada poet nor does it aim to chronologically tell his murder, his loves, or his work. What it does is start from one of the projects that Lorca left unfinished and use that void to imagine the lives that could have existed and those that were interrupted by repression, war, and rejection. "It is not a film about Lorca. It is not a biopic about Lorca," Javier Ambrossi himself has explained.
The film, written by Calvo, Ambrossi, and the playwright Alberto Conejero, connects three men in three different moments: 1932, 1937, and 2017. Sexuality, desire, pain, and inheritance traverse the three stories, connected by a manuscript that refers to one of the last works that Lorca left unfinished. The Ministry of Culture and the Cannes Film Festival precisely summarize the film as three existences united by those elements and by the unfinished legacy of the writer.
The few pages that Lorca could never finish
The starting point is a project that Federico García Lorca was preparing in 1936, the same year he was murdered. Its initial title was "The Black Ball," although he later considered "The Dark Stone," a name that decades later Alberto Conejero would recover for his theatrical work. From that Lorca project, only a few sheets are preserved, along with testimonies from people close to the author that allowed for the reconstruction of part of the story he intended to develop.
The idea revolved around Carlos, a young man trying to enter a casino in Granada. The members of the institution decided on admission through a secret vote with white and black balls: the white represented acceptance and the black, rejection. Carlos receives the black ball and is excluded. The memories conveyed by Lorca's collaborators such as Cipriano Rivas Cherif and Victorina Durán linked that rejection to the protagonist's homosexuality.
It is worth introducing a nuance here. The casino scene has become the most well-known explanation of the project, but not everything that is known about the plot appears literally in the preserved pages. Part of the reconstruction comes from later testimonies of people who knew Lorca and knew what story he wanted to write. It is precisely this fragmentary condition that has given freedom to Los Javis and Conejero to develop their own film instead of attempting an impossible adaptation of a complete text that never came to exist.
Why a "black ball" meant being rejected
The title is not just a metaphor created for the film. The use of white and black balls was historically a voting system employed by clubs and private societies to decide who could become a member. Introducing a black ball meant voting against the candidate, to the point that in some systems a few negative votes could prevent their admission. Hence also comes the English verb "to blackball," used to talk about vetoing or excluding someone.
For Los Javis, that image also works as a much broader metaphor: that of those who grow up feeling that there is something in them that can provoke their expulsion from society. Javier Calvo already explained during the initial presentation of the project that the black ball represented the rejection that many people situated on the margins end up internalizing.
"The dark stone," the other great root of the film
The second fundamental piece was not written by Lorca, but by Alberto Conejero. His play "The dark stone," premiered in 2015, recovers the real figure of Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, secretary of La Barraca and one of the most important people in the poet's sentimental life. Rapún joined Lorca's theatrical project during the thirties and died in 1937, during the Civil War, after being wounded on the northern front.
Conejero imagined in his work a meeting between Rafael, a prisoner and wounded, and Sebastián, a young man who guards him. They are two men initially separated by war, ideology, and their circumstances, but between whom a relationship develops that allows for discussions of identity, fear, and the preservation of Lorca's memory. That play was, in fact, the direct trigger for the film: Los Javis had seen it years earlier and later revisited the possibility of bringing their universe to cinema.
During a plane trip, the reading of "La piedra oscura" led the directors to delve into Rodríguez Rapún and, from there, to discover the connection with that unfinished project of Lorca that also bore the title "La bola negra". From the union of those two materials, the feature film was born.
Rafael Rodríguez Rapún existed; Sebastián belongs to fiction
Here the film deliberately mixes historical and created characters. Rafael Rodríguez Rapún was a real person, linked to Lorca and La Barraca. Sebastián, on the other hand, comes from the dramatic construction of Conejero. This mix allows "La bola negra" not to function as a documentary reconstruction of the Civil War, but as a work of fiction supported by historical characters and events.
Miguel Bernardeau plays Rafael, while Guitarricadelafuente brings Sebastián to life. The story unfolds after Lorca's assassination and centers on the question of what happens to someone's legacy when that person is no longer there and those who knew them have to decide what to keep, what to tell, and what to silence.
Three eras to tell almost a century of homosexuality in Spain
The Javis do not stay in the thirties. The great addition of the film is to construct three timelines that span 1932, 1937, and 2017. The first directly approaches the universe of Lorca's unfinished work; the second draws from "La piedra oscura" and Rafael Rodríguez Rapún; the third shifts the question of memory and identity to contemporary Spain.
In 2017, Alberto, played by Carlos González, receives a legacy related to the manuscript and at the same time tries to piece together a family history marked by silences. There is no simple narrative connection between all the characters, as if they were consecutive chapters of the same biography. What unites them is something more abstract: the difficulty of expressing desire, the inheritance received from previous generations, and the consequences of what a family or society decides not to say.
Hence Cannes defined the film as a work "inhabited" by Lorca rather than as a movie directly about him. The directors themselves have explained that one of their intentions was to remember the struggles of previous generations of homosexual men and how many had to hide an essential part of their lives.
Lorca does appear, but he is not the protagonist
Federico García Lorca physically appears in the film, played by the playwright and performer Alberto Cortés, although his presence is limited. The character functions more as a figure that traverses the narrative than as the protagonist of a conventional biography.
This approach responds to a conscious decision by Los Javis. The film does not attempt to recreate every episode of the writer's life, but rather to ask what remained after him: his texts, the men who loved him, the stories he did not finish, and a part of the Spanish homosexual experience that for decades remained much less visible than other aspects of his literary production. RTVE has precisely pointed out that the film claims that queer legacy of Lorca and a dimension of his biography that for years received less attention in some studies about the author.
An unfinished work within a film about unfinished lives
The fact that Lorca did not finish "La bola negra" also acquires another inevitable meaning: he did not finish it because he was murdered after the military coup of 1936. Los Javis have turned that interrupted text into the symbolic center of a film about other futures that also could not develop. RTVE notes that the directors consider it a work dedicated to "all the unfinished lives."
This idea runs through Carlos, Rafael, Sebastián, and the contemporary characters. Some cannot live openly their desire, others arrive too late, and others inherit the consequences of decisions made decades earlier. That is why the manuscript matters so much: what is missing in those pages is as important to the film as what Lorca managed to write.
Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, and a cast that expands the universe
The film also features a particularly large cast. Alongside Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, and Carlos González appear Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close. Cruz plays Nené, while Close brings Isabelle to life. The roles of both are integrated into a narrative that combines historical drama, war, melodrama, and musical moments.
The result has a considerable scale: the Ministry of Culture sets a duration of 157 minutes and officially defines the film as a Spanish-French coproduction produced by Suma Content Films, Movistar Plus+, El Deseo, and other partners. After competing in Cannes, Los Javis obtained there ex aequo the best direction award.
From Cannes to Toronto and to the Spanish race for the Oscar
"The black ball" arrives in Spanish cinemas after a long international journey. It was presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where Calvo and Ambrossi were awarded for direction, and later won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Academy of Cinema has also selected it as the film that Spain presents to compete for the Oscar nomination for best international film.
Its journey helps to explain why a work of which only a few pages remain has ended up, ninety years later, as one of the most impactful Spanish films of 2026. The Javis have not tried to literally answer the question of how Lorca's "The black ball" would have ended. They have done something different: using that nonexistent ending to imagine what stories could be hidden behind it.
So, how much Lorca is there really in "The black ball"?
A lot, even though it is not a biographical film. The title, the unfinished project, Carlos, and the idea of rejection symbolized by the black ball belong to Lorca; Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and his relationship with the poet are historical; the dramatic encounter that articulates "The dark stone" comes from Alberto Conejero; and the three periods, the cinematic structure, and a good part of the characters and connections that allow that story to reach 2017 belong to Los Javis.
That is why "The black ball" should not be understood as the film of an unknown work by Lorca that has now simply been adapted. There was no complete work to adapt. A few pages remained, memories of what the writer intended to do, and a title loaded with meaning. Calvo, Ambrossi, and Conejero have used those remnants as a starting point to ask what happened to those who for decades also received their own "black ball": people forced to hide, remain silent, or live a life different from the one they would have chosen.