Los Javis filmmakers fight fascism and homophobia with ‘La Bola Negra’

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. In the private clubs of nineteen thirty Spain, the Members used a tidy little system to decide who belonged. They dropped balls into a box. A white ball meant you were in A single black ball meant you were out.

The gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca began a play about that cruelty. He called it La Bola Negra. The Black Ball. But before he could finish it, Lorca was arrested and murdered. His body was never found, only four pages of the play survived.

Ninety years later, my guest today Spanish directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosi. Have turned Lorca's pages into an epic about the men spang shut out. Gay men persecuted through the Civil War and the decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The film takes viewers through timelines. A young man blackballed in nineteen thirty two.

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