'Immediately spellbinding': Four reasons why gay Spanish epic La Bola Negra could win the Oscar for best picture

Telling the stories of three gay men across a century, this sweeping but relatively low-budget drama is second favourite to The Odyssey for the Academy's top prize. Here's why it could beat out Homer.

From the first 10 minutes of gay historical epic La Bola Negra, it's hard not to recognise you are seeing something very special. Opening with a scene of a sleepy Spanish village during the Civil War of the 1930s thrown into violence, it has a visual beauty and storytelling rhythm that are immediately spellbinding. It is inspired directly by the work of the revered early 20th-Century poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, but also sprawls in other imaginative directions, creating a tapestry of memory, art and sexual repression across a century of Spanish life. 

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's film tells the story of the lives of three gay men: Sebastian, in 1937, is a man who's been conscripted into Franco's army during the Spanish Civil War and is grappling with his love for a prisoner he is guarding. Carlos, in 1932, is a bourgeois twenty-something who's been rejected for membership of an exclusive casino club due to rumours of his sexuality. Alberto, in 2017, is a historian and researcher who comes into an unexpected inheritance from his estranged grandfather. La Bola Negra connects these stories in poignant and unexpected ways. 

When the film first hit the Cannes Film Festival this May, the buzz around it inspired a bidding war between heavy-hitter distributors – an early sign that something special might be happening. Now being released by Netflix in North America, it is set to be a major Oscars contender. Odds makers put it at second favourite for best picture – meaning it could be set for a David and Goliath-esque battle with current favourite The Odyssey. Here's why it could even overcome the combined power of Homer and Christopher Nolan.

Since it premiered in Cannes, La Bola Negra has been a runaway hit with critics, regular audiences, and just about everyone in between. The Hollywood Reporter said it was "a sweeping, heartsick, often funny journey of recollection and fantasy. It is high time we had a gay war epic of this scope and soulfulness and invention."

It won best director for its film-making duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (tied with Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski), and went on to win the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival this autumn, too, which has been a common precursor for the Academy's best picture nominees and winners.

On top of this, it is proving a runaway commercial hit in its native Spain, with its box-office numbers actually increasing from its first to second weekend. All this is the kind of international recognition that makes the Academy sit up and take notice. 

Mastering a complex triple-storyline structure across timelines is one mean feat. Blending multiple genres – romance, historical epic, family drama – is another. But at La Bola Negra's core throughout are its themes of gay desire, persecution and self-punishment. In the 1932 segment, there's a haunting story Carlos is told about a young gay man who was beaten to death and left to rot in a town square for 100 days. If the fear of homophobic violence rumbles under the surface of La Bola Negra throughout, the 2017 timeline also allows for reflection on it. Alberto scrolls Grindr and works on a project "on the margins of dissident desire".

More happily, La Bola Negra also takes seductive pleasure in scanning male bodies at play and rest: nude soldiers swimming in a stream, sailors smoking on city fences, tendrils of dark hair flopping elegantly over the eye. It shows courage in foregrounding sexual desire as much as it does persecution. As co-director Javier Ambrossi told Awards Watch: "A lot of our community is based in silence and pain... The movie encourages you to say: if you can do it, do not be a conformist, try to fall in love. Be happy, look for a spark." Twenty years have passed since another gay epic, Brokeback Mountain, was egregiously beaten to best picture by the now-unpopular Crash. A win for La Bola Negra could go some way to rectifying that mistake. 

As Sebastian, musician and first-time actor Álvaro Lafuente Calvo – better known as Guitarricadelafuente – is remarkable. He has a sharp-planed, large-eyed look that can shift from openness to hunched paranoia by turns. It's perfect for a character whose traumatic past and constant fear of being discovered combine with a yearning sensitivity. As if this wasn't impressive enough, the star also made much of the original music for the soundtrack. Calvo and Ambrossi have discussed their preference for casting gay actors for gay roles, and were particular about doing so with this project. Carlos González is also excellent as the diffident 2017 character Alberto, who has a moving journey through his own family history across the course of the film. His scenes opposite veteran Pedro Almodóvar star Lola Dueñas, as his difficult mother, are wince-inducingly real. 

The film also pulls in supporting performances from the international A-list, with Glenn Close as a US academic who helps Alberto on his research journey and, most memorably, Penélope Cruz, who performs an exuberant cabaret song for a bar of soldiers as a glamorous, freewheeling nightclub singer. It's a showstopping appearance that has put her in contention for a best supporting actress Oscar, but the backbone of the film remains the performances from the less experienced and/or well-known actors so carefully chosen by the film-makers. And, if the film's buzz continues to grow, there's hope that more than one of this ensemble may be nominated, which will hold it in good stead for the biggest award of Oscars night.

If La Bola Negra is proof of anything, it's that Calvo and Ambrossi know how to frame an image and make it sing. Lavish, ambitious, and formally daring, their film is heavenly to look at – shot on location in remote abandoned villages or in hyper-real sets. Shot by cinematographer Gris Jordana on 35mm film stock, each of the three stories has a distinct visual identity, taking cues not only from their settings but from the psychological framework of their protagonists. The camera lingers in a frozen overhead shot over a truck full of soldiers' corpses, full of blood and gore, until we see that someone there is alive. It glides beautifully through a smoky, darkened bar where Carlos drunkenly dances with strangers. And it sits static over a snowy field, stunning and melancholy, like a cinematic sigh.

The directors have discussed how the film was knowingly inspired by operatic Hollywood dramas and big-time Oscar-winners The English Patient and Titanic – which makes it all the more remarkable that all of this was achieved on a budget that came in under $20m (£15m). As Calvo said in an interview with El Pais: "a lot of people praise the film's classical sensibility… We're told it's the kind of film they don't make anymore." And that's exactly why it may appeal to Academy members. 

La Bola Negra is released in US cinemas on 16 October and UK cinemas on 6 November

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