Cannes to Christmas: Los Javis Built the Film Everyone Will Claim They Knew F…

La Bola Negra is that film.

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Overview

And the fact that it's *La Bola Negra* being run through the Oscar-season machine matters, because Los Javis are not the kind of filmmakers who make films that sit comfortably in machines.

Their work is heightened, operatic, emotionally baroque in the best possible way — the kind of storytelling that makes you feel like you've been wrung out and put back together slightly differently.

Daniele Luchetti — whose *The Ties* opened Venice 2020 with the kind of elegant devastation that Italian directors make look effortless — has a new film with Tecla Insolia in the lead, playing an orphan searching for her birth mother.

The title alone (*Dove Non Mi Hai Portata* — Where You Never Took Me) is doing structural work before a single frame has been shot.

Insolia is twenty-two and has already been in the kind of projects that serious Italian cinema reaches for.

There is a particular type of film that arrives at Cannes already trailing mythology — the kind where the press screening overruns, the standing ovation hits four minutes, and by the time the festival ends, every conversation in every industry dinner has quietly reorganised itself around whether you've seen it yet. *La Bola Negra* is that film. Los Javis — Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish duo who built their reputation on television that felt like theatre that felt like confession — have made something that Netflix is now scheduling with the precision of a chess move: theatrical in November, streaming in December, timed perfectly to land in the consciousness of every awards voter before the year closes.

This is not accidental. This is a campaign. And the fact that it's *La Bola Negra* being run through the Oscar-season machine matters, because Los Javis are not the kind of filmmakers who make films that sit comfortably in machines. Their work is heightened, operatic, emotionally baroque in the best possible way — the kind of storytelling that makes you feel like you've been wrung out and put back together slightly differently. Streaming gets it in December. Awards voters get it first.

Meanwhile, Italian cinema is doing its quieter thing. Daniele Luchetti — whose *The Ties* opened Venice 2020 with the kind of elegant devastation that Italian directors make look effortless — has a new film with Tecla Insolia in the lead, playing an orphan searching for her birth mother. The title alone (*Dove Non Mi Hai Portata* — Where You Never Took Me) is doing structural work before a single frame has been shot. Insolia is twenty-two and has already been in the kind of projects that serious Italian cinema reaches for. This will be worth watching when it arrives.

Elsewhere, Gary Oldman is being given the Golden Icon Award at Edinburgh TV Festival for *Slow Horses*, which — if you haven't watched it — is the rare spy drama that respects the intelligence of everyone in the room, including the viewer. Oldman's Jackson Lamb is shambolic, brilliant, unkempt, and completely impossible to look away from. A late-career turn this good doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone finally gave him a character with actual architecture and stepped out of the way.

Three projects. Three different speeds. One industry, still occasionally capable of building something that lasts.

Editor's Note

Four minutes is a standing ovation; six is a verdict — I've seen Cannes manufacture both, and the difference is always audible in the room.

— Alex de Valletta

Dua Mifsud

Culture, Fashion & Gen Z Editor

Dua Mifsud dropped out of university in her second year, not because she couldn't do it but because she could see exactly where it was going. Her mother is in Malta, her father is in London, and she is usually somewhere between the two — on a plane, in a concert queue, or watching a film alone in the dark. She is the shortest person in any room and usually the most dangerous.

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Edited by Ilhan Irem Yuce · Chief Editor, News Beast