This prize-winning new Netflix movie looks every bit a modern classic
La Bola Negra comes with accolades already attached
I'm not necessarily in the group of people who think that awards mean all that much for movies nowadays – I've lived through too many travesties for that attitude to really stick. Still, I'll definitely defend the place of film festivals, and their attendant awards, in the distribution system, and when a movie arrives with an award from one of the bigger festivals it's generally a great sign that it has real promise.
That's exactly the box that's been ticked by La Bola Negra on Netflix, which just got a full trailer that gives us only its theatrical release date (16 October), although Netflix has separately confirmed its streaming date as 2 December. It looks like a pretty stunning film, and crucially it won the Best Director prize at the Cannes film festival.
The film looks hugely ambitious and striking, and Netflix says that it follows three generations of men in three drastically important phases of Spanish history – 1932, 1937, and 2017. Each makes discoveries that rock them to their core, as they try to find a sense of belonging in times that don't make such a thing easy.
Two of those moments are obviously set during war, and it looks like we'll meet a ragtag bunch of characters fighting in those conflicts, which won't be glamourised at all. Perhaps the most curious part of the film is one of its stars, the Spanish musician known as Guitarricadelafuente, who's been getting wild plaudits for this breakout acting role.
It's rare to see this sort of self-built star branching out into a new medium and basically smashing it out of the park at the first attempt, and you'd have to assume that his existing musical fanbase will be a big asset for the film's popularity on arrival. Netflix rarely dresses up its trailers quite so pretentiously as this one, suggesting that it has confidence in the artistic merit here.
It's certainly got me interested – this looks like it could be a great one to see in the cinema, although it might be hard to know how long that theatrical run will be. At least it's coming to streaming before the year's out.
