La Bola Negra’s directors unpack their 'Epic Gay Drama'

Within the first few moments of La Bola Negra, bullets disrupt a band lightly strumming their instruments in the Spanish countryside. Bombs drop on unsuspecting villagers, littering streets with bloodied bodies and thrusting Sebastián (Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente, in his debut film role) away from his home. Fleeing the carnage, he gets swept into the fascist army. Being jolted by the gore and viscera of war was part of directorial duo Los Javis’s plan for the film: It’s not just a war movie, but an anti-war movie.

“I don’t think queer movies have to be kind or nice” Javier Calvo, half of Los Javis, says. “They can show the harshness of the world.” Such brutality comes from their own cinematic diet; underneath La Bola Negra’s triumphant peak is an iceberg of film knowledge, its sometimes bitter tone stemming from the oeuvre of Michael Haneke, Ivan’s Childhood by Andrei Tarkovsky, and Elem Klimov’s historical anti-war epic Come and See. The epic primogenitors populating its mood board include such decade-spanning productions as The English Patient, Titanic, and The Hours.

“We wanted to make a mix between the movies we love, the message, and create something new,” Javier Ambrossi, the other half of Los Javis, says. Calvo adds that they can use the “rules of traditional war movies, but make it with a queer perspective and a contemporary gaze.”

Throw it all together and you have the critically acclaimed La Bola Negra, which has elicited raves on the festival circuit, drumming up Oscar buzz and outlining the rules of an entirely new cinematic genre: the Epic Gay Drama. Yes, queer soldiers have been on screen before, but Los Javis seem to have cemented the hallmarks of what an EGD — an acronym Calvo and Ambrossi seem to have embraced — entails. In a year of large-scale, big-budget filmmaking that includes Christopher Nolan’s mythological The Odyssey and the starbound science fiction romp Project Hail Mary, La Bola Negra offers a true thesis for how queerness can nuance war movies and how epic films can embrace the intimacy of queerness.

“I wanted the intimacy to connect with a lot of people, but at the same time we wanted to make it big,” Ambrossi says. “The intimacy touches you because there’s a lot of things contrasting with it.”

Los Javis on La Bola Negra's set with GuitarricadelafuenteNetflix

Queering the wartime epic also meant undercutting some of the genre’s conventions by finding funny moments in tragedy and drama in comedy. That, Calvo claims, echoes the work of queer auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar and Gus Van Sant.

Close-up shots counterbalance the sweeping vistas, bombastic explosions, and clamoring crowds. During his time in the army, Sebastián meets and falls for Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a real person who fought in the Spanish army and was the partner of legendary Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, whose lost play gives the film its title.

“In the editing, it was a lot of eyes,” Calvo says. “It’s like Portrait of a Lady on Fire but make it Apocalypse Now.” He continues, “I love directors that show reality in a harsh way and we wanted to do that but have this tenderness in how Sebastian sees the world.”

With La Bola Negra, queerness is much more than just the characters’ sexualities; it is a shared history and lineage. While the stories are particular to LGBTQ+ people, the grand scale emphasizes the universality of its anti-war themes.

“We are writing and directing universal stories,” Ambrossi says. “In order to be universal, you don’t have to change the sexual orientation of the characters. I think that’s homophobic.”

For those new to Los Javis, the duo are known for a filmography that eschews the constraints of genre. Even from their first film, La Llamada, a musical with an indie spirit, Calvo, 35, and Ambrossi, 42, wanted to upend genre expectations. Their television series Paquitas Salas is a more “poetic,” in Ambrossi’s words, take on mockumentary comedy. And, with both their acclaimed TV show El Veneno and La Bola Negra, they document the way the past impedes on the present.

La Bola Negra, which alternates between 1932, 1937, and 2017, embraces a vision of time inspired by Lorca, who wrote in his poem “La leyenda del tiempo,” “El sueño va sobre el tiempo/ flotando como un velero,” which roughly translates, “The dream goes over time, floating like a sailboat.” They wanted viewers to get lost in time, sometimes even feeling unsure of how one scene and one era flows into one another.

“Some people,” Ambrossi says, “when they’re out of a screening, say at some point they just had to let go of themselves, just go with the flow.”

The film’s time jumps ultimately show a queerness that endures over time. When Alberto (Carlos González), a contemporary historian, is told his grandfather was a fascist, he searches for the truth and uncovers a deeper queer history, something Calvo says young LGBTQ+ people can wrestle with.

Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau in 'La Bola Negra' Netflix

“It’s about understanding our sisters and knowing that they had no options,” Calvo says. He believes that the past is a “mystery that you have to crack,” to which Ambrossi adds that it’s a “mystery that connects” LGBTQ+ people over space and time.

“We are connected, and I don’t know if we are aware of that,” he says. “We’re part of the same rejection.”

Ultimately, Ambrossi and Calvo say, the film’s titular “black ball” is the shame engrained inside queer people since youth — and the film is a cry to remove it. It might seem like a tall order for a war movie to take on the long lineage of queer shame, but that is what La Bola Negra does beautifully, using its anti-war leanings as a call to reject killing one another’s bodies and spirits. Here, queerness is war’s antidote: hopeful, optimistic, and forward-looking.

“I think it’s important to make a movie that shows the horrors of war, the emptiness of it,” Calvo says. “It’s the opposite of possibility.”

This article is part of The Advocate’s Nov-Dec 2026 print issue, on newsstands November 3. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting October 22.