TIFF 51: “La Bola Negra” is this year’s People’s Choice Award champion!

by Cláudio Alves

Ever since its third edition, the Toronto International Film Festival has allowed its audiences to vote for their personal favorites. Back in 1978, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends took the prize, and, to this day, remains in the minority of titles to win the TIFF public’s favor without scoring any Oscar nomination. Populist appeal reigns supreme in this honor’s storied history, as does Hollywood's overshadowing of world cinema in the mainstream mindset. Before this year, we need to go back to 2011’s Where Do We Go Now? to find a victor not spoken in English. And if we’re talking about Spanish film in particular, Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from 1988 was the only People’s Choice champion with a Spaniard production behind it. Until La Bola Negra, that is.

Los Javis’ Best Director prizewinner from Cannes is now well positioned in the awards race to come, backed all the way by Netflix, and having even convinced the Toronto crowd to deliver one of those protracted standing ovations that go viral every year directly from the major European fests. The Best International Film nomination seems all but secured for Spain, maybe even the win. Some are considering it a Best Picture frontrunner, already, which would be unheard of for a Spanish flick. And that’s it for awards chatter. Now, let’s focus on what really matters – the film itself…

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Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

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