To Watch in Theatres: La Bola Negra

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Movie Selection: La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)

La Bola Negra is currently playing in Chicago's Music Box Theatre. After film festival screenings across 2026, the Spanish movie is receiving a theatrical release before moving to streaming on Netflix in December.

Although no physical copies are available, the movie still has a strong sense of how media affects the political climate through archival work.

FastPlay

The movie intersects three different storylines from 1932, 1937, and 2017. Watching the movie is the best course of understanding the story, however each plot will be explained independently as they feed into the next.

1932

Carlos is an aspiring socialite as the son of an upper class, traditional family in a Spanish town. He goes to the town's casino to apply for membership.

The casino's council vote using white balls for yes and black balls for no, to which Carlos gets a majority no and is denied membership: the reason being he is rumored to be a homosexual.

Carlos then goes home where his sister shows frustration with her expectations as a woman and his as a man, then his dad pressures him to demand be allowed membership through a revote.

Carlos goes to the town bar, talks with his gay friends, then meets with members of the club who tell him to deny the rumors of him being gay.

As Carlos goes to demand a revote, there is growing political unrest as civilians show frustration against the ruling class that becomes violent. In their reconsideration, the council asks directly if he is a homosexual, to which he denies then immediately gets killed by the civilians storming the casino.

Carlos then awakes in a snowy landscape as folklore figures of his town wander around, now a figure rather than a person who had the opportunity to express himself as he wanted.

1937

Sebastian is a small town trumpeter who prepared a welcome ceremony for the Axis Powers as they enter Spain.

Unfortunately, the planes began deploying bombs and dispatching soldiers to attack the town as Sebastian runs away. He gets found by the Spanish Civil War's Nationalist faction as he joins them to survive.

His first mission to watch over Rafael Rodríguez Rapun, a prisoner of war from the opposing Loyalist faction. The Nationalist faction plans on interrogating Raphael for his intel on the Loyalists' operations.

Sebastian guards Rafael but becomes enamored by him as Raphael retells his life story of joining a theatre company, being a soccer player, and eventually falling in love with poet & playwright Federico García Lorca.

Unfortunately, the Nationalists then finish interrogating Raphael as they plan an execution with Sebastian being tasked as the one delivering the bullet.

Before being killed, Raphael begs Sebastian to find Lorca's first play, La Bola Negra: a story about an aspiring socialite Carlos being denied entrance to a casino. Sebastian then executes Raphael.

Later, Sebastian fulfills Raphael's dying wish of finding the play, but leaves the first few page behind.

2017

Alberto is a historian hunting for new work to write on and archive. One day, he gets a call about his estranged grandfather dying and including him on the will.

Curious about the contents, he asks his mom about the contents of the will to which she avoids any questions by doing cocaine in the bathroom. She plans to sell the house she inherited in the will since she says her father abandoned her young leaving her with an abusive mother.

Alberto ends up going to collect the contents left for him in the will by his grandfather's lawyer, which ends up being instructions to deliver the last few pages of a manuscript.

Despite never speaking with his grandfather, Alberto stays the night at the house left for his mom and finds out his grandfather kept up with his failed stint as a playwright.

Alberto finds out that the transcript was actually the final pages of La Bola Negra and shows them to a historian dedicated to Lorca: Alberto is the grandson of Sebastian.

Realizing the house has historical and sentimental value, Alberto and his mother ask the lawyer not to sell the house, which he agrees to and reveals that he was Sebastian's partner.

The movie ends with Lorca explaining why he wrote La Bola Negra with an explicitly gay male protagonist to his lover Raphael: gay men have to move in silence, which is dangerous for when they have to bottleneck their desires in the pursuit of survival.

Special Features

La Bola Negra the in-story play is a great metaphor for queer archiving: with queerness, silence and stealth is key to survival, so archives of queer lives are often abstracted into art and performances that leave little record.

Even records of queer lives, like the play, cannot explicitly be based on the author's life and instead need to leave the impact rather than a direct retelling of their lives: Carlos is not based on Lorca's entire life but the anxieties he has on living a public life in a homophobic time.

Carlos shows hesitation around engaging with his amorous homosexual friends but still doesn't commit to acting heterosexual by having sex with women as he was invited to in his story. He only represents a fraction of Lorca while providing a moral for those who do not live their authentic selves in pursuit of survival.

The movies does seem to have the compulsive need for a romance between Sebastian and Raphael, which seems unexplored. They both live in an war-torn political landscape and find solace in each other's company, yet the movie does not completely convince audiences that their intimate relationship needs to be romantic: an important distinction in queer stories.

Alberto also serves as a relaxing anchor of the story: as the stories intersect between Carlos's growing coup and Sebastian's militant life, Alberto is on the train preserving the manuscript in newspaper.

Despite being the protagonists in the framework of the story, Alberto goes through the least amount of traumatic events. In historical fiction and queer texts, this is greatly appreciated to show the fruits of the labor from the previous generations have a lasting effect on the current one.

Ending Credits

La Bola Negra is evidence that archiving of queer people is one large fetch quest to contribute to a higher knowledge. Queer lives operate silently, so attempts can only be made to capture true queer life.

The movie captures the growing tension, battles, and eventual peaceful life after as the future generations settle in the accrued knowledge. Beyond the movie, it responds to the greater goal of queer texts: not to simply entertain but engage viewers with their own approaches with their everyday lives.

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