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Los Javis win Cannes Best Director award for La bola negra
Los Javis leave Cannes with one of the major awards under their arms. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have won the award for Best Director for La bola negra, their most ambitious film to date and one of the major surprises of the official competition. The award was shared ex aequo with Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, honoured for Fatherland.
The recognition comes after a very strong reception at the festival. La bola negra received a very long ovation after its premiere and had generated positive international reviews, especially for the way it combines historical memory, desire, repression and a queer perspective on the figure of Federico García Lorca.
The film is inspired by Lorca's unfinished text and by Alberto Conejero's La piedra oscura. Los Javis construct a story across three periods — 1932, 1937 and 2017 — to speak about three men marked by desire, guilt and a historical wound that remains open in Spain. It is not a conventional Lorca biopic, but a film that looks at what was often left out of the official narrative: his sexuality, his silences and the violence that marked his memory.
The award confirms the international leap of creators who, until not so long ago, seemed linked above all to television, theatre and pop culture. After La llamada, Paquita Salas, Veneno and La Mesías, Calvo and Ambrossi have reached Cannes with a work of greater scale, an international cast and a visual ambition much closer to great European auteur cinema.
The cast has also helped turn the premiere into an event. Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, Miguel Bernardeau and Guitarricadelafuente feature in a film already surrounded by anticipation before setting foot on the red carpet. The presence of Guitarricadelafuente, in his acting debut, has been one of the most discussed details of the team's time in Cannes.
The night was especially important for Spanish cinema. For the first time, three Spanish films competed together for the Palme d'Or at Cannes: Amarga Navidad, by Pedro Almodóvar; El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen; and La bola negra, by Los Javis. The directing award makes the latter the great Spanish success of the edition.
The Palme d'Or ultimately went to Fjord, by Romanian Cristian Mungiu, but Los Javis' name is now linked to an edition that was highly symbolic for Spanish cinema. According to several media outlets, it is the first time since Pedro Almodóvar's directing award for All About My Mother in 1999 that a Spanish director has obtained this recognition at Cannes.
The award comes at the best possible time for La bola negra, which is scheduled to open in Spanish cinemas on 2 October 2026. Until then, Cannes gives it more than a prestige label: it provides an international introduction that would be hard to improve on and confirms that Los Javis are now playing in a league where every film is watched far beyond Spain.