Can a single film fold time and offer intergenerational healing to an entire community? Short answer: . The Spanish cinema sensation, , arrives on our shores full of promise. Filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi – together known as Los Javis – won the Best Director prize at Cannes. In Spain, cinemagoers queued around the block at sold-out screenings. The film’s original song, “La Nieve”, sung by breakout star Guitarricadelafuente (try saying that after three sangrías), has become a global hit and an anthem for disaffected emo youth. The cast, made up of unknown actors alongside heavyweights such as Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close (at the height of their powers), is the toast of Hollywood.
This cultural moment is well deserved. is not only visually sumptuous, sexy and heartbreaking, it also reclaims queer love in a world where right-wing nationalist populism threatens our hard-won rights.
Guitarricadelafuente as Sebastián and Miguel Bernardeau as Rafael.
I believe deeply in art’s power to bring about social and political change. Marches, campaigning and education all matter. But storytelling makes empathy possible. Yes, we must celebrate our differences and uniqueness; at the same time, seeing ourselves in the “other” allows hearts and minds to soften. As the trite saying goes, love is love: a universal connective tissue. I’d argue that the American sitcom , beamed into front rooms across the world in the Noughties, did more to normalise and humanise homosexuality than almost anything else. Art is political in this way: it can move society forward through compassion and recognition.
Coming of age in the ’90s felt like growing up in a cold, dark vacuum. Section 28, the Conservative policy that forbade the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, was deliberately vague. It left a generation of children – straight and queer – without guidance, care or sex education at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I wasn’t alone in thinking I might be the first person ever to wonder if they were gay. Thanks to the British press, the messages I did receive about homosexuality were shaming, terrifying and incredibly dark. To be gay was to face a death sentence.
“It’s incredibly moving to see young gay actors tell their own stories,” Jack Guinness writes.
We then lost a huge part of a generation to the disease. That left us with fewer role models, fewer couples to look up to, fewer elders to guide us and teach us that being gay could be something precious, something to cherish. Television shows such as Queer as Folk were essential, but they often revelled, quite understandably, in hedonism, drugs and sex. Though ultimately a story about platonic love and the power of community, it left me wondering: where were our sweeping love stories?
Enter , a historical epic on the scale of , with a delicate, textured love story at its heart. It weaves together the stories of three gay protagonists in Spain in different time periods: Carlos (Milo Quifes) in the Spanish Republic in 1932, Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) during the Civil War in 1937, and Alberto (Carlos González) in 2017. Their lives are inextricably linked, their stories laid over one another like a palimpsest.
Carlos’s story is the most mysterious, a young man facing a stark dilemma: to be honest about who he is, or lie. His narrative unfolds as the film develops, a gorgeously shot golden thread of magic realism that runs parallel with the different eras before finally reaching out to us, the audience.
Alberto’s story, meanwhile, unfolds like a great Almodóvar film – hilarious, heartbreaking and full of eccentric, tortured characters. He inherits something (I won’t spoil the film) that he doesn’t know what to do with. Meanwhile, his queerness takes him on a journey in which the past bleeds into the present, fiction shapes real life, and integration becomes possible.
Sebastián, played by newcomer and musician Guitarricadelafuente, is a trumpeter whose village is destroyed before he is conscripted into the fascist army. There, he meets the mysterious Rafael, the enemy prisoner he is tasked with guarding. Their story is agonisingly beautiful. So much between the two men goes unspoken. Sebastián, like so many of us, discovers desire before he has the words to name it.
The film was inspired by an unfinished manuscript by the great Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, who completed just four pages before he was murdered in 1936. Its premise is simple: a young man seeks to join a club whose members vote on potential new admissions using white and black balls. He receives the black ball – rejected because of rumours about his sexuality. Had Lorca finished it, it would have been his first play with an explicitly gay protagonist. The writer appears in a scene in , and tells his lover that he wrote the story to help young gay men, so they would not end up like the two of them. This film exists to let young gay people know that, not only are they not alone, they walk in the footsteps of their brave, complex, creative queer ancestors.
It is incredibly moving to see ’s young gay actors tell their own stories: it’s clear they are bringing lived experience and tangible truth to their roles. For too long, gay actors have been sidelined into “sassy best friend” roles, or ignored completely. While six straight men have won the Best Actor Oscar for playing gay roles, no openly gay man has won it, and no trans actor has won an Oscar for playing a trans character. Like trans people, our community is hugely frustrated by how rarely we are given the chance to tell our own stories.
Penélope Cruz in .
Queer narratives have too often been hidden for people’s safety, or forcibly erased through acts of cultural vandalism and straight-washing. brings these stories into the light, where they can be mourned, loved and celebrated. In the film’s 2017 timeline, Glenn Close plays a renowned Hispanist and Lorca scholar. She speaks of families who hide or destroy evidence of their ancestors’ queerness – literally burning their letters. That kind of loss makes it harder to recover queer history. But the self-erasure is the deepest wound: the censorship we learn to impose on ourselves. Each of the characters struggles with this inheritance, and in their own way, tries to face the past and be fully seen. At the film’s climax, one character simply says his own name, and in doing so, claims his whole being.
Alberto’s inheritance brings the film’s timelines together. By the end, the question at its heart has become our own: what will we do with what we inherit? The characters are not only figures we as an audience look back at; they are looking towards us, begging us to act. They never knew us, but they wanted us to be free. The film leaves us with an instruction: to live, to live, to live.
La Bola Negra is out 6 November