This Spanish poet's work was banned and censored. Now it's an epic movie

A titan of Spanish culture, the proud socialist, poet, playwright and theatre director Federico García Lorca was most likely executed, aged 38, by General Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces in August of 1938 as the country was torn apart by bloody civil war.

Lorca's works were banned until 1953, then heavily censored until Franco's death in 1975. Even then, Lorca's family concealed his overtly queer work for fear of tainting his legacy. The Sonnets of Dark Love emerged in 1983 against the family's will.

La Bola Negra, four pages of which Lorca penned shortly before his murder, has been adapted into an astonishing queer epic spanning 80-plus years by directorial duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known collectively as Los Javis.

Drawing on that fragment and the play La Piedra Oscura by screenplay co-writer Alberto Conejero, the Palme d'Or-nominated triumph is one of the biggest box office hits in Spanish history. It's easy to see why.

Slings and arrows

Told across three distinct storylines, La Bola Negra opens on bored-looking trumpet player Sebastián in 1937. Played by real-life musician and singer Guitarricadelafuente, replete with a mop of curly dark hair, he's part of a band tasked with musically accompanying a flyover by Benito Mussolini's Aviazione Legionaria.

But the Italians mistake the Nationalist-sympathising villagers practising the Nazi-inspiring saluto romano for Republicans, strafing the town square in a Guernica-like atrocity, leaving countless dead, including Sebastián's mother.

Sebastián goes on the run. Finding temporary sanctuary in a partially collapsed church, he scrabbles over the rubble as his lips almost touch those of a shattered sculpture of the saint that shares his name. The arrow punctures are an image that bleeds through this beautiful film.

He is soon captured by Nationalist soldiers and pressed into service as a prison guard. His ward is real-life Atlético Madrid player, actor and sometime Lorca lover Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau) who arrives, guts exposed, in a cart carrying the mostly dead.

As the maimed Rafael recuperates, a clearly dazzled Sebastián can't keep his eyes off the fallen soldier, illustrated by cinematographer Gris Jordana's aching camerawork fluttering erotically on the rise and fall of Rafael's Adam's apple.

Blackballed

Another storyline is set in Granada, 1932, before the war, and is centred on a wealthy young man named Carlos (novelist Milo Quifes, in his screen debut). Natty in a white pinstriped suit, he is attempting to gain membership of a prestigious private club. After each member votes via a white ball (for yes) or black (for no), he is cruelly rejected.

The whirr of the baubles dropping is another example of the film's potent imagery and a nod to the etymological origin of the film's title. He's barred because of his penchant for illicit meetings with men after dark and stolen glances at sunbathing sailors, which have become common knowledge.

Carlos's stern father (Antonio de la Torre) insists he must man up, explicitly linking gender to sexuality, and deny these "scurrilous" rumours and gain entry — but a subtler blow comes from his loving sister (Natalia de Molina) as she reflects on how she curbs her own wishes and hews to societal expectations, imploring him to do likewise.

The unique burble of a notification on hook-up app Grindr bursts the bubble of these historical strands.

This time it's queer music historian Alberto (Carlos González) who's cruising. It's now 2017, and he's stunned by an unexpected inheritance from his late grandfather, a man he does not know. Alberto's ferociously cranky mother (a magnificently bolshy Lola Dueñas), still aggrieved at his abandonment of their family, yells at Alberto to ignore the summons to Cantabria.

Similarly reluctant, Alberto is cajoled into going by his boyfriend, Juan (a surprisingly understated cameo by comedian Julio Torres), who points out the perversity of a historian uninterested in his own past.

What awaits him in Cantabria will tear off the scabs of his family history and that of the country, as these seemingly disparate strands twist tighter.

Face the music and dance

That La Bola Negra can paint on such a large canvas, holding close to its characters and their truths while honouring Lorca — portrayed by Alberto Cortés in black-and-white flashbacks — is remarkable. Particularly as Los Javis shoot for something grander than a bog-standard biopic.

Depressingly rare these days, the filmmakers understand that film can use light and sound in subtly destabilising ways. They know how to frame their players, adored by Jordana's lens, in conversation with one another beyond the verbal.

In union with their frequent editor Alberto Gutiérrez, they stitch these non-linear threads together in supple fashion, finding room for fireworks on the beach and Glenn Close speaking Spanish.

A show-stopping cameo from Penélope Cruz as Nené, a spectacular cupletista in the grand mould of Olga Ramos, is a performance for the ages that delivers loaded drama.

In one of the film's most tender moments, Nené encourages Sebastián to flee the army and find himself in Madrid, sharing her adoration of historic drag star Edmond de Bries, saying that his bravery, "Is the fantasy of the possible, and war is the opposite."

Snowdrifts

La Bola Negra is full of such tantalising possibility, of hope for a better, truer life, with Carlos's mother (María Morales) also begging him to leave for Madrid. It's the city where Lorca and Rafael fell into one another's embrace, inspiring those once-lost sonnets.

As Cortés's Lorca says, "This country has too many love stories buried in the fields. We have to scratch the earth so they can emerge. So more of them can exist."

La Bola Negra is such a releasing scratch, a great heaving sigh for the stories never told, for the lovers bold and lost, their stories resurfaced. There are moments, like a stolen embrace in a darkened cell, a pinprick of light piercing the dark like a Goya painting, that will wound you. It is a work of art as soft and scalding as the snow that drifts to Los Javis's majestically unmooring conclusion, then lingering on.