LA BOLA NEGRA (Los Javis, 2026) is the most popular film of 2026 in Spain, surpassing SPIDERMAN BRAND NEW DAY  and THE ODYSSSEY in number of tickets sold and is also currently the third-highest grossing Spanish film in Spanish film history. It won Best Director at Cannes, People’s Choice at the Toronto International Film Festival, the audience award at the BFI London Film Festival, and many more prizes. I’ve seen it twice and the majority of the people in the audiences I saw it with here in Birmingham stayed in their seats until the lights came up, when one could see some of them crying. It moved me greatly both times. It’s main achievement to me is in fusing the silence of the closet with the ‘Pact of Silence’ over the Civil War, thus integrating subcultural concerns into the dominant national-popular, the struggle to speak, tell, breathe, understand and thus live differently a shared struggling cutting across social formations.

With all this success, the backlash has been swift and vicious: t’s not radical enough, not queer enough, not very good cinema, too monumental says Justin Chang — as if the film were some version of C.B. De Mille in Stanley Kramer drag. I admire Chang but his review in THE NEW YORKER has something of the imperial about it, the dictates from a centre that knows nothing of the periphery but no barrier to its circulation in and throughout Spain; and at the speed of light, as if Chang’s uninformed views on Spanish cinema and culture were proof the film’s success was just marketing and publicity (which Los Javis are indeed superb at);a point underlined here by Adam Mars-Jones in his review of the film, with its headline of ‘Don’t Believe The Hype About La Bola Negra’. Mars Jones is a lesser critic than Chang, less informed and more confident; do you need to know anything about another culture before commenting if you’re British? Clearly Mars-Jones feels he doesn’t and misses the point of the film, spectacularly.

All of this as prelude and context to my wanting to speak to Alberto Mira on the film. Mira is a Professor in Film Studies at the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University who has written numerous books on Spanish Cinema (THE CINEMA OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 2005; HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF SPANISH CINEMA, 2010), LGBTQ+ cinema ( MIRADAS INSUMISAS: GAYS Y LESBIANAS EN EL CINE. 2008; ENTRE LA CÁMARA Y LA CARNE: EL CINE HOMOERÓTICO EN 25 PELICULAS, 2023); queer history (DE SODOMA A CHUECA: UNA HISTORIA CULTURAL DE LA HOMOSEXUALIDAD EN ESPAÑA EN EL SIGLO XX, 2004); and queer theory (CRÓNICA DE UN DEVENIR: SUBJETIVIDAD, TIEMPO Y GENERACIONES, 2021). I can’t think of anyone better informed on this intersection of subjects, which necessarily frame a discussion of this particular film.

In the podcast we discuss how LA BOLA NEGRA  is mainstream, not art cinema, inventive without being innovative but very substantial. We talk of its relationship to Lorca and Alberto Conejeros’ play on Lorca (LA PIEDRA OSCURA, 2013); the themes of unfulfilled lives, repression and silence as ways the queer intersects with the national/popular in Spain, particularly in relation to narratives of the Civil War; the importance of the moments with Glenn Close and Penelope Cruz, not just sparkly star cameos, but adding significant thematic richness, the first in relation to pre-Civil War gender and sexual freedoms; the latter in relation to biography; we also talk of the casting of Guitarrica de la Fuente and Miguel Bernardeau; the importance of the last section of the film, with the grandson, Alberto; Lola Dueñas as the mother; the uses of esperpento throughoutLA BOLA NEGRA, and the way the film links the queer and the civil war to silence, inheritances, repressions…and much more. You can listen to the podcast below:

The podcast may be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

After our chat, Alberto wrote me elaborating a bit more about the concentration camps for homosexuals in Francoist Spain,

‘I checked the dates for concentration camps for homosexuals in Spain. Tefia in Fuerteventura opened in 1954 and closed in 1966. The Badajoz one, like the Huelva one, only held homosexuals from around 1968. Essentially what I said, but needed to check further. The legislation was more homophobic in the later years of the regime than in the earlier ones. Maybe because in early Francoism one did not need a legal justification for homophobia. It was all over, in society. The Catholic church enforced homophobia and sexphobia in ways that the legal system did not. It was only when Spain had to pretend they had some kind of stable legislation that homophobia had to be written in stone. Some activists actually claim that the worst period came after 1970, as there was a legal change that made homophobia explicit and also there was more visibility as the church was starting to lose its grip on society’.

An illuminating chat on a wonderful film.

My own first impressions of the film on the initial viewing were:

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Skipped our usual Saturday dinner because I was offered a preview screening of Los Javis’ LA BOLA NEGRA and couldn’t wait to see it. It lived up to the hype – best director at Cannes, People’s Choice at TIFF, setting box office records with over 600,000 tickets sold in its first three days in Spain alone, etc– and at the end of the film much of the audience was in tears, lingering in the theatre past the credits, not wanting to leave.

It’s quite extraordinary for a queer movie about Fedérico García Lorca’s last/lost play, historical memory, creating utopias out of disaster, dressing darkness with poetry, bringing into light what was hidden, and dramatizing the effects of all those silences on subsequent generations. The film is set in three different periods, 1932 during the second Republic, 1937, in the midst of the Civil War, and 2017, the film’s present, which is already ten years ago. The film cuts seamlessly from one time to the other as intent on their intermingling as on their demarcations, though the audience is never at a loss to understand what is when.

The film is gorgeous to look at with a real eye for finding texture and depth in the visuals but also as is to be expected from the writers of PAQUITA SALAS,  great lines. And indeed much of what the film explores can be relayed through snippets of dialogue: ‘You’ll never understand how much I love you because you sleep within me and are asleep (this one from Lorca); ‘I feel none of the hours have ever belonged to me because I haven’t lived them’; ‘We were very happy, we all lived in mortal sin. Let’s hope we can sin again, soon, in Madrid’; ‘Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite’; ‘A faggot’s heart is an ocean full of secrets’; ‘What do we lose when we deny our very selves? Life!’; ‘I think I can help people so they don’t end up as you and I’; ‘Who will defend me from your beauty?’; You’ve inherited something you don’t know what to do with. You’re Spanish’; Spain has too many love stories buried in the camps. We have to scratch the earth so they may come out.

I am of course particularly vulnerable to this material. The young people in the war could be my grandparents, though the young man who gets sent on the quest for his grandfather’s legacy would be at least a generation younger than I. It’s a film that, as the audience response in Spain testifies, has all kinds of resonances.  But it clearly also travels well. Miguel Bernardeau (ELITE, the new ZORRO) is the beauty Lorca falls for, pop-sensation Guitarrica de la Fuente is the peasant who falls in love with his captive, Carlos González is the grandson on the search. Penelope Cruz has a marvellous star turn as a cabaret entertainer; and Glenn Close appears as a Lorca scholar. Gris Jordana is the cinematographer. The score of the film is superb and worthy of the film’s visuals. A film to see.’

José Arroyo