A co-winner of the Best Director Prize at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, La Bola Negra weaves together the wounds left by the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship through the lives of three men living across three eras (1932, 1937, and 2017, respectively). The title is drawn from an unfinished play by Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright executed in 1936, and his absence and memory run through the entire film. Rather than following time in a linear fashion, directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo interweave memories and emotions to reveal the traces that a history of violence leaves on individual lives. Bodies shattered at gunpoint, lost freedom and destroyed art, and the language of queer people forced into silence and the tokens of their love are newly unearthed and restored. The two directors’ gaze is fixed not on what was said, but on what could not be said - identities left undisclosed and manuscripts left unfinished. The film imagines those scattered, unspoken words and speaks to both the survivors and those who have become ghosts. (LEE Juhyun)