The Black Ball: from Lorca’s four pages to the Oscar race

Best Director at Cannes, standing ovation in Toronto: The Black Ball is now Spain’s official candidate for the Academy Awards.

Directed by Los Javis, the film opens in Spanish cinemas on 25 September 2026. It also takes us on a journey through three Spanish landscapes, each holding a piece of history.

A story Lorca never finished

In the casinos and private clubs of 1930s Granada, one black ball was all it took. Dropped into the ballot box, it rejected a candidate.

Federico García Lorca began a novel on this idea. Its hero: a young man “blackballed” because of rumours about his homosexuality. However, he only wrote four pages before his murder in August 1936.

Almost ninety years later, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi took up these fragments. In Spain, everyone knows them as Los Javis. Drawing on them and on Alberto Conejero’s play La piedra oscura, they created The Black Ball.

A 159-minute epic shot on 35 mm film, weaving together three lives across three eras:

• 1932, Granada – Carlos (Milo Quifes) applies to join the city’s most exclusive casino. But a secret ballot turns him down.
• 1937, the northern front of the Civil War – Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente, in his screen debut) is a musician in Franco’s army. He falls in love with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a wounded Republican prisoner. In fact, Rafael had been Lorca’s last love.
• 2017, Madrid – Alberto (Carlos González), a writer, digs into a family secret with his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas). Step by step, he then reconnects the threads of the past.

The Black Ball: desire, silence and inheritance

The cast also includes Penélope Cruz as a nightclub singer and Glenn Close as an American scholar. The film tells a story of desire, silence and inheritance. In other words, everything that families and society tried to hide.

Its directors call it “an epic gay drama for everyone”.

El Albaicín
Granada, Andalusia
The Moorish quarter facing the Alhambra – Lorca’s Granada in the 1932 storyline.

Former Pontifical University
Comillas, Cantabria
Its Major Seminary became a Civil War field hospital for the 1937 storyline.

Castil de Carrias
Belorado, Burgos – Castile and León
A village uninhabited since 1994, turned into a war-torn set where filming began.

Why the locations of The Black Ball matter

In The Black Ball, places are not a backdrop: they are witnesses.

Each era of the story rests on a real landscape with its own memory. First, the whitewashed alleys of Lorca’s Granada. Then, a monumental seminary on the Cantabrian coast. Finally, a village of Castile emptied by time.

This is exactly what screen tourism is about: stepping into a scene. Then discovering that the history behind it is even stronger than the fiction.

El Albaicín, Granada: Lorca’s city in 1932

Granada is the emotional heart of the film. First, the crew recreated Plaza Nueva with period cars, Republican flags and more than 200 extras. It also filmed in Plaza de Santa Ana, the Carrera del Darro and the steep streets of the Albaicín.

Together with the Alhambra, the old Moorish quarter is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Between its cármenes, whitewashed walls and viewpoints facing the Alhambra, this is the Granada Lorca knew and wrote about.

Travel tip: continue your walk to the Huerta de San Vicente, the Lorca family’s summer house. Now a museum, it also appears in the film.

Comillas, Cantabria: a seminary turned field hospital

On the Cantabrian coast, the former Pontifical University of Comillas dominates the town from its hill. Its Major Seminary dates from the late 19th century, under the patronage of the Marquis of Comillas. In the film, it becomes a Civil War field hospital.

This is where the 1937 story of Sebastián and Rafael unfolds – and the choice is no coincidence. Indeed, the real Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, wounded on the northern front, died in a military hospital in Cantabria. That was in August 1937, one year after Lorca. He still rests in Santander’s Ciriego cemetery.

Travel tip: Comillas is also one of Spain’s great modernist towns, home to Gaudí’s El Capricho. The crew also filmed nearby, around Oyambre beach and in Herrerías.

Castil de Carrias, Burgos: the silence of an empty village

This is where it all began, on 26 August 2025. Castil de Carrias hides in the hills near Belorado, between Briviesca and the Camino de Santiago. It has had no inhabitants since 1994.

Its stone houses offered an authentic setting for the war scenes. So did the arcaded church of Santa María, with its half-collapsed bell tower. The old building of the school and town hall completed the set.

The art department added false façades. In addition, the production hired hundreds of extras from the surrounding area. Finally, Briviesca’s firefighters secured the explosion sequences.

Travel tip: an easy detour for pilgrims walking the Camino through Belorado. The buildings are in ruins, so visit with care and respect. The site shows how cinema can put Spain’s emptied villages back on the map.

The Black Ball on the road to Hollywood

In September, the Spanish Film Academy chose The Black Ball to represent Spain. The film is aiming for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. It thus beat Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s El ser querido and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Los domingos.

The film arrives with serious momentum. At Cannes, it won the Best Director award, shared with Paweł Pawlikowski. It then took an audience award in Sydney, a triumphant reception in Toronto and excellent reviews.

The next steps are already on the calendar. Netflix acquired the US rights. It will release the film in American cinemas on 6 November. After that, it will stream it from 4 December. French audiences will discover it on 16 December with Le Pacte.

Then all eyes will turn to Los Angeles. The Academy will reveal the nominations on 21 January 2027. Finally, the 99th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on 14 March 2027 at the Dolby Theatre, in Hollywood.

Whatever happens that night, the Albaicín, Comillas and Castil de Carrias will still be there. They will wait for travellers who want to walk in the footsteps of Lorca, Sebastián and Rafael.

See you in the next chapter of our travel diary!