The power of cinema as both an art form and a spectacle is undeniable. So much so that governments have never hesitated to harness its narrative power as an instrument of propaganda, alongside cinema in the service of protest and denunciation, as well as its more aestheticist and experimental strands. The Black Ball (2026), for its part, opts for a form of historical revisionism in the service of a cause. Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known as the Javis, the film’s screenplay was developed with the participation of playwright Alberto Conejero, and its cinematography is by Gris Jordana. The Spanish Film Academy has selected it to represent Spain in the Best International Feature Film category at the 2027 Oscars.

Setting aside its box-office success and critical acclaim — although the film also has its detractors —, it reflects a characteristic feature of our civilisation: the affirmation of forms of jouissance. In this sense, it constitutes a queer revision of Spanish history that erases or simplifies the other conflicts that have shaped it. The choice of García Lorca’s unfinished manuscript as a central metaphor is therefore far from incidental, nor is the choice of the Spanish Civil War as its setting. The war appears as a tragic backdrop that underscores and heightens the drama of forbidden love, rather than as a conflict involving many other dimensions about which the film has nothing to say. To take just one example, Federico García Lorca was murdered by Francoist forces alongside a Republican schoolteacher and two anarchists. His death cannot be explained solely in terms of his homosexuality, although this is what the film seems to suggest; it must also be understood in the context of the repression unleashed by the insurgents against the Republic. The film dissolves every conflict other than that embodied by the black ball.

The film’s revisionism imposes a particular mode of narration, closer to a relatively simple story, built around striking, carefully composed scenes rather than a complex historicization. Its primary aim seems to be to stir feelings and passions, the terrain on which identifications prevail. This is reinforced by the construction of hollow, stereotypical characters, such as the cheerful Francoist soldiers and the amusing nuns who praise the “reds” for their good behaviour in hospital. The war is thus stripped of much of its violence and turned into the setting for a story of forbidden love.

The cinematic sequences overflow with emotion, thanks to excellent cinematography and a carefully chosen soundtrack, at the expense of a narration that might have made the complexity of history — and even the very impossibility of narrating it — more apparent. Scenes steeped in aestheticism, if not outright exhibitionism, abound, such as the one in which Sebastián climbs the statue of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. These images contribute to simplifying the conflict, as though there were only one issue to defend: the affirmation of a form of jouissance.

La bola negra unfolds across three stories of male homosexuality, set in three different periods — 1932, 1939 and 2017 — and linked by a text, an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca, and by the metaphor of the black ball as a mark of social exclusion. The premise is promising. Yet the stories become predictable and sentimental. Some central elements of the screenplay are also insufficiently resolved, such as the delivery of a letter from García Lorca, which seems to be one of the story’s cornerstones, but whose resolution lacks dramatic force.

The film’s emotional intensity allows us to ignore, or at least to soften, the death drive that persists throughout history and finds one of its most extreme expressions in war. Ultimately, the film offers a celebration of persecuted and forbidden love, capable even of bringing enemies together. Yet while this love is celebrated, other forms of jouissance continue to be segregated. The film raises an important question: how are we to live with the jouissance of the foreigner, the stranger — the other whose enjoyment we find intolerable? I am not sure, however, that the film finds the answer.

* Psychoanalyst member of WAP and ELP. Practices psychoanalysis in Barcelona