La Bola Negra wins Toronto audience award with gay drama spanning three generations

La Bola Negra follows three men living in different periods of Spanish history, connecting their experiences through desire, secrets and the past they inherit. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close are among the cast of a drama that brings gay lives into focus across almost a century.

The Spanish title translates into English as The Black Ball. It is a Spanish-language film, with English subtitles listed for its UK festival screening, so viewers do not need to speak Spanish to follow the story.

Behind the camera are Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish filmmaking duo collectively known as Los Javis. Their film moves between three periods, exploring how lives separated by decades can remain intimately connected.

The story begins in Spain in 1932, with a young man waiting to discover whether he has been accepted into a local casino. It then moves to 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, when a nationalist soldier guards a republican prisoner.

The third strand takes place in 2017, when a historian inherits an unexpected document from his grandfather. That discovery connects his own life with an earlier generation, opening up questions about what families preserve and what goes unspoken.

Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is an important influence on the film. Its inspiration includes his unfinished work La bola negra, bringing his writing into a story about sexuality, memory and inheritance.

Alongside Cruz and Close, the cast includes Miguel Bernardeau and Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente. Although its story crosses different historical periods, the connections between its three central men keep desire and personal experience at the heart of the film.

For UK audiences hoping to catch an early screening, Broadway cinema in Nottingham lists La Bola Negra on 10 October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. The screening is advertised in Spanish with English subtitles, with a running time of 155 minutes.

That makes it two hours and 35 minutes, worth allowing for when planning the evening. General ticket sales opened on 17 September, while the film’s UK and Irish cinema release has been advertised for 6 November.