The heart swells with the sonorous riffs of a trumpet in La Bola Negra. Melancholy improvisations upon the horn provide refreshing bursts of pure and raw emotion as musician Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) confidently blows a tune as an act of resistance. His trumpet offers an assertion of life and love, and a call for peace, amid wartime.

Sebastián finds himself running for his life, with only his trumpet, tied carefully at the waist, as a memory of home. His small village “accidentally” gets attacked at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Everybody dies—his mother, small children, and villagers who simply gathered to hear him play music. However, Sebastián survives by declaring his allegiance to the Fascists and joining the army. It’s kill or be killed, but Sebastián finds an unexpected life force in this company. Tasked with observing Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), an Adonis of an injured enemy soldier, Sebastián gains inspiration by refusing to let his softness be perceived as weakness during wartime. His music often pierces the fracas of the barracks. He injects notes of beauty to the ruckus to remind himself, and others, to carry on.

His musical music echoes through time as La Bola Negra weaves between past and present. In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) campaigns to join an exclusive members-only club. A board of elder patrons determine the vote with white and black marbles deciding candidates’ fates. Carlos falls out of favour as the black balls weigh a majority for the “nay” side. The stodgy old members can’t see beyond rumours of Carlos’s homosexuality. The black ball serves as a marker of shame and stigma for men like Sebastián in 1937, or for Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez) in 2017, but this film valiantly breaks that cycle.

The contemporary thread sees one generation valiantly find peace for another as Antonio embarks on a quest to fulfill his estranged grandfather’s dying wishes. Antonio must track down Rafael’s surviving family and deliver some papers that his grandfather’s been protecting in secret for years.

These papers may seem trivial, but they’re priceless for Antonio—and for any other gay man inspired by stories of queer life that came before them. Alberto, a struggling playwright and researcher, knows well the lore of the lost play by Rafael’s old flame Federico García Lorca. Before the playwright died, he left behind four pages of his final play: La bola negra, a tender work about a young gay man seeking admission in an exclusive club. As Alberto journeys from Madrid to his grandfather’s remote village, weaving between Grindr hookups and video calls with his boyfriend (Julio Torres) and clashes with his mother (Lola Dueñas), this mission to complete his grandfather’s promise lends renewed passion to his creative and personal flames.

This sweeping, decades-spanning drama easily marks the crown jewel in a very strong year for queer cinema at the festival. La Bola Negra offers a love letter from the heart to queer artists who fearlessly bring LGBTQ lives and lives to the stage and screen. Los Javis, aka Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calva, create an astonishingly intricate tome poem that beautifully acknowledges past lives and lost loves as they complete an unfinished play by an artist who inspired them.

The film imaginatively extrapolates upon the fabled four pages of García Lorca’s La bola negra. As characters within the film observe while discussing the incomplete piece, La bola negra marks García Lorca’s only work with an openly gay protagonist. This landmark makes the mystery of the text extra poignant, as the playwright himself becomes one of the spectres that haunts the film as gay men across generations extend his final extravaganza. It’s Suite Française by way of The Hours with a posthumous work that nimbly traverses timelines and heartaches to create an interconnected and intergenerational love story.

As Sebastián and Rafael tenderly gain mutual trust in the infirmary and Carlos waffles over whether to appeal his rejection by denying himself in order to appease the membership committee, La Bola Negra continues García Lorca’s work while contextualizing it in the concentric circles of love and relationships that helped it endure. The Javis intimately connect and complement the timelines within La Bola Negra as gestures, textures, and images echo throughout this shared history. A smattering of white paint on Antonio’s shirt nods to the light and fluffy snow that evocatively brings Carlo’s story to an imaginative climax, while Sebastián softly fashions a tune, “La nieva,” as a soulful nod to the man who inspires makes his heart swell. The notes conjure a pitter-patter of their own with each refrain.

As the tender melodies of Sebastián’s music provide stirring connective tissue to the storylines, the Javis masterfully ensure that each note of the stories builds upon the other. Too often do these sort of expansive, multi-thread films prove elusive. However, instead of withholding information for “a-ha!” moments, La Bola Negra confidently trusts the audience as Antonio serves as their surrogate and fact-finder. The film smartly makes the associations both narratively and thematically as it reveals Carlos’s story to be the play-within-the-play, so to speak, as the mystery behind the papers that Antonio’s grandfather held dearly becomes a unifying tale of heartbreak.

La Bola Negra furthers García Lorca’s work by affording a new generation of artists a platform for queer stories. Many players in the film’s excellent ensemble are debut performers, which further demonstrates the filmmakers’ confidence with the material and their vision to realise it. The film proves the apex of gay cinema by literally assembling an army of hot men who are as strong in spirit as they are in physique. For one, Guitarricadelafuente gives a star-making performance as Sebastián. His soulful, expressive eyes inject the film with heartache, longing, and the power of desire. Meanwhile Gonzalez provides levity and an accessible entry point with a cantankerous character who couldn’t be more different from the actor who sashays around the film’s press tour.

The film also pays tribute to women with key female roles that connect the players. In the 1937 thread, a volcanic performance by Penélope Cruz steals the show as a cabaret singer who teaches Sebastián to love open-heartedly and without shame. Cruz vivaciously delivers two musical numbers as her ingénue lifts the soldiers’ spirits (among other parts), while also showing the power of tenderness among brutes. She makes an impression that lingers far beyond her screen time.

The same goes for Glenn Close as an academic who authenticates Antonio’s papers and Dueñas as his mercurial mother. Each woman plays an essential role in shaping these men and the art they create.

There’s a lot at stake here as the Javis complete an unfinished text while also honouring a lost history of queer lives and loves. However, they boldly rise to the challenge. La Bola Negra is a film of remarkable power and beauty, an unabashed testament to queer experiences and a celebration of the courage it takes to be true to oneself in the face of adversity. It’s a true cinematic achievement from a pair of filmmakers brave enough to unabashedly elevate their signature gay magic to a canvas of this scale.

 

La Bola Negra premiered at TIFF 2026 and has further screenings on September 18 and 19.

Head here for all of That Shelf’s TIFF 2026 coverage.