La Bola Negra's directors unpack their 'Epic Gay Drama'

Within the first few moments of La Bola Negra, bullets disrupt a band lightly strumming their instruments in the Spanish countryside. Bombs drop on unsuspecting villagers, littering streets with bloodied bodies and thrusting Sebastián (Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente, in his debut film role) away from his home. Fleeing the carnage, he gets swept into the fascist army. Being jolted by the gore and viscera of war was part of directorial duo Los Javis’s plan for the film: It’s not just a war movie, but an anti-war movie.“I don’t think queer movies have to be kind or nice” Javier Calvo, half of Los Javis, says. “They can show the harshness of the world.” Such brutality comes from their own cinematic diet; underneath La Bola Negra’s triumphant peak is an iceberg of film knowledge, its sometimes bitter tone stemming from the oeuvre of Michael Haneke, Ivan’s Childhood by Andrei Tarkovsky, and Elem Klimov’s historical anti-war epic Come and See. The epic primogenitors populating its mood board include such decade-spanning productions as The English Patient, Titanic, and The Hours.“We wanted to make a mix between the movies we love, the message, and create something new,” Javier Ambrossi, the other half of Los Javis, says. Calvo adds that they can use the “rules of traditional war movies, but make it with a queer perspective and a contemporary gaze.” Throw it all together and you have the critically acclaimed La Bola Negra, which has elicited raves on the festival circuit, drumming up Oscar buzz and outlining the rules of an entirely new cinematic genre: the Epic Gay Drama. Yes, queer soldiers have been on screen before, but Los Javis seem to have cemented the hallmarks of what an EGD — an acronym Calvo and Ambrossi seem to have embraced — entails. In a year of large-scale, big-budget filmmaking that includes Christopher Nolan’s mythological The Odyssey and the starbound science fiction romp Project Hail Mary, La Bola Negra offers a tru