ABOUT THE FILM
LA BOLA NEGRA, the bold new film from Spanish writer-directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, won the Best Director award at Cannes and the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Inspired by the surviving pages of an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca and by Alberto Conejero’s award-winning play La piedra oscura, the film tells the interconnected stories of three gay men in Spain in 1932, 1937, and 2017. Moving from the years before the Spanish Civil War, through the war itself, to the present day, LA BOLA NEGRA is a sweeping, passionate triptych about desire, repression, historical memory, and what one generation carries forward to the next.
PANEL DISCUSSION FOLLOWS
Our panel will explore the film’s roots in Lorca’s work, its portrayal of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco era, and how it brings queer history and historical memory to the screen.
CARLOS RAMOS
Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literary Studies and Professor of Spanish, Wellesley College
Carlos Ramos’s teaching and research focus on the literature and cultural history of contemporary Spain. His published work includes Construyendo la modernidad: Escritura y arquitectura en el Madrid moderno (1918-1937) and Poesía insomne.
WAN SONYA TANG
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Boston College
Wan Sonya Tang teaches courses on Spanish literature and culture from the nineteenth century onward. She is the author of Specters, Monsters, and the Damned: Fantastic Threats to the Social Order in 19th-Century Spain and co-editor of Televising Restoration Spain, which examines how heritage film and television explore Spain’s relationship to modernity in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Moderator:
FERNANDO ROSENBERG
Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brandeis University
Fernando Rosenberg is the author of After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990-2010.