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 feature film proper, and it premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where the pair won the Best Director prize and the screening drew an ovation reported at some twenty minutes.

The film takes its title and impulse from one of Federico García Lorca's last, unfinished projects, and 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 moves from the singer Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau to Lola Dueñas and Penélope Cruz, and the directors fold in musical passages — most famously a use of the old standard "Soldadito español" — that mark the film as unmistakably theirs.

For a debut 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, positioned La bola negra as one of the boldest Spanish films in years, and confirmed Los Javis as authors able to carry their flamboyant television sensibility onto the largest stage in world cinema.