Calvo & Ambrossi Reimagine Lorca's Lost Play in 'La Bola Negra' — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi discussed their award-winning film 'La Bola Negra' at Deadline's Contenders London, a triptych of interconnected gay men's stories set in 1932, 1937, and 2017.
- Alberto Conejero's 2013 play 'La piedra oscura' — which dramatized the real-life love between football player Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and Federico García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War — served as the film's primary literary source.
- The directors traveled to Granada to consult Lorca's surviving four-page screenplay at the Centro Federico García Lorca, and learned from Lorca's niece that citizens hid manuscripts throughout the war to keep them out of fascist hands.
- Guitarricadelafuente, cast as young trumpeter Sebastián, said reading the first monologue on a plane reduced him to tears, calling it 'something touched deep inside, like a wound I didn't know I had' about Spain.
- Penélope Cruz joined the cast as Nené Romero, a cuplé singer entertaining soldiers during the Spanish Civil War — a brief role she personally lobbied for after becoming 'blown away' by the script at a directors' lunch.
- The film's core conceit imagines the gay drama Lorca was murdered before he could write, reconstructing it from his character list on the first surviving page.
Why it matters: The film materializes a sliver of queer Spanish history that fascism attempted to erase: Lorca's unfinished manuscript, hidden from destruction and now reimagined 90 years later. By weaving those four surviving pages into a present-day timeline, Calvo and Ambrossi frame 'La Bola Negra' as both cultural recovery and a direct confrontation with what Spain lost — and what was deliberately silenced.
Ask SkimNews
