The Black Ball

Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, the duo known across Spain as Los Javis, built their reputation on television, from the cult musical La llamada to the series Paquita Salas, Veneno and La Mesías. La bola negra is their first feature film proper. It premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where the pair won the Best Director prize, and the ovation after the screening was reported to have lasted some twenty minutes.

The film takes its title and impulse from one of Federico García Lorca's last, unfinished projects, and it braids together three lives across different eras of Spanish history, including the long shadow of the Franco years. Sexuality, desire, pain and inheritance pass between the stories like a current. The cast runs from the singer Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau to Lola Dueñas and Penélope Cruz, and the directors fold in musical passages that could only be theirs, the best known of them built on the old standard "Soldadito español".

For a first feature the ambition is considerable: a queer reckoning with national memory, mounted on a grand canvas. The Cannes Best Director award and the heat around the premiere put La bola negra among the boldest Spanish films in years, and they showed that Los Javis can carry their flamboyant television sensibility onto the biggest stage in world cinema.