La Bola Negra

TIFF Film #19

(Insert one of a million quotes that pierced my heart and left me with a pit in my stomach)

Monumental filmmaking. Epic in every sense of the word. It's so rare in cinema to get films of this scale, let alone a queer film of this scale. It's no wonder why Los Javis felt a need to make La Bola Negra at this point in history. A film which weaves together the stories of queer people throughout time and serves as a reminder that queer people have always been here, even if they sunk into shadows and kept themselves in the proverbial closet where it was safer.

We've entered a period of history where we are trying to erase queer history, queer stories, queer culture. The world has denounced queerness as a thing of the present, that queerness is this new thing that has suddenly materialised. But queer people have always been here and this movie shines a light on the ways in which our stories are connected to theirs.

The film itself is dealing with a period of time where so much was lost to the rise of fascism. Lives, art, love, music. In an era where history seems to be repeating itself, art like this is so important to remind us of the failures of our past so that they aren't repeated in the present.

The film ingeniously is a completion of an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca entitled La Bola Negra. He was this foundational queer playwright and a very important queer figure in history.

The film's grand thesis, the main driving force, is this thread that exists between all queer people. Queer people's lives and decisions in the past filtering and rippling through to the present. In the film's construction and through adapting and completing García Lorca's work, it is this declaration that queer people have always existed and elicits this incredibly stirring idea of how interconnected the lives of queer people are even if they aren't necessarily related. They are related by their queerness.

It is a skill to weave something so incredibly vast and grand, swirling and all-encompassing, but at the same time so delicate and intimate in the ways that it depicts the inner lives of these men. Numerous times in this film I was so moved by the ways we'd cut to different time periods the swelling score or the gorgeous cinematography. It's a film that is operating at such an incredibly high level in every single craft. It feels like there's love baked into the film.

The film culminates in something that I can only describe as poetry. Pure and utter poetic magic. It's so easy in our modern world to get angry, to lash out, to fear the oppression lingering around the corner, but this film serves as a reminder that the most powerful thing we can do is love