La Bola Negra is about the Spanish Civil War – but is unmistakably about our present moment

The new Spanish Civil War film La Bola Negra feels difficult to separate from the present.

Set across 1932, 1937 and 2017, La Bola Negra follows three gay men whose lives become connected across generations: a young man facing exclusion because of his sexuality; a soldier who forms a forbidden bond with a Republican prisoner during the civil war; and a historian uncovering a buried family history.

Their stories gradually converge around an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca and the lives that history tried to erase.

The film explores what a nation chooses to remember, whose lives are given a place within that history, and what happens when freedoms once assumed secure can no longer be taken for granted.

As political movements around the world again contest sexuality and who has a place within the nation, those questions no longer feel safely confined to the past.

Lorca’s queer life

Lorca, one of 20th century Spain’s leading poets and playwrights, was murdered in 1936, weeks after the civil war began.

His death made him one of the war’s most enduring symbols, while his homosexuality was long marginalised in accounts of his life. At his death, Lorca left four pages of an unfinished play called La Bola Negra (The Black Ball), which he intended to centre on a young man rejected from a Granada social club for being gay.

Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi draw on that fragment to create three linked stories, showing how political repression passes between generations.

In 1932, it appears as social exclusion. During the civil war, it becomes imprisonment and the threat of death. By 2017, it survives through family silence and buried histories.

The film suggests repression does not simply disappear. It changes form, while leaving traces that later generations are forced to confront.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after a military uprising against Spain’s elected Republican government. General Francisco Franco led the Nationalist forces, backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, to victory in 1939. He ruled Spain as a dictator until his death in 1975.

His regime repressed political opponents, persecuted queer people and made its version of the war the official account.

After Franco’s death, Spain’s transition to democracy was widely praised as a political success. But the violence of the civil war and dictatorship was largely left unresolved.

The “pact of forgetting” was never a formal agreement, but political leaders feared that investigating past violence and identifying those responsible could destabilise the new democracy.

Political stability therefore took precedence over investigating the past and recognising its victims.

Yet official silence did not mean forgetting. During the first decades of democracy, memories of the war and dictatorship continued within families and civic associations, largely outside state institutions.

From the late 1990s, campaigns to recover remains from mass graves, alongside film and literature, brought those memories into wider public debate. Spain’s “memory boom” showed that political silence had never amounted to collective forgetting.

Guillermo del Toro’s films The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) found large audiences by exploring the civil war and its aftermath through horror and fantasy.

La Bola Negra changes what counts as part of the civil war story. By treating queer persecution as part of the conflict and its aftermath, the film queers that familiar history.

Returning to Lorca through an explicitly queer story, it asks us to remember him as a gay man, as well as a victim of the war. The film shows the history of the civil war is incomplete when queer lives are left at its margins.

Why does a civil war drama feel urgent now?

Spain will vote in a snap general election on November 29. Pedro Sánchez leads one of Europe’s few remaining left-leaning governments and has become a prominent international voice on progressive issues.

Current polls put the conservative Popular Party ahead and suggest it could govern with the far-right Vox.

If Vox enters national government, it will be the first time a far-right party has done so since Spain’s transition to democracy.

In regional governments, Vox has sought to repeal LGBTQIA+ laws and supported changes in Valencia that restricted parts of its trans protections.

At the national level, it has called for the repeal of Spain’s 2023 law protecting trans and LGBTQIA+ rights.

The party has likewise pushed to repeal laws dealing with the memory of the civil war and Franco dictatorship, including those which recognise LGBTQIA+ people persecuted under Franco among the dictatorship’s victims.

A degree of cultural fatigue with civil war stories came after decades of returning to the conflict. Isaac Rosa captured that sense of saturation in the title of his 2007 novel, ¡Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra Civil! (Another Damn Novel About the Civil War!).

That sense of distance is harder to sustain now.

Vox challenges how Spain remembers the civil war and dictatorship, while questions of sexuality are again politically contested. With the party potentially entering national government, the history La Bola Negra revisits feels much closer to the present.

The film is rooted in Spain’s past, but its questions are not uniquely Spanish. The past has not changed. What has changed is how close some of its questions now feel.

La Bola Negra is in cinemas from Thursday.