The Feroz Awards, the Ondas Awards, the Iris Awards, the Forqué Awards… the early productions of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, from The Call to Paquita Salas or Poison, can boast a wide repertoire of accolades. But it has been with their successful second feature, The Black Ball, that they really had to expand the trophy shelf.
After winning the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, they then received the Critics’ Choice Association Award, the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (something unheard of for a Netflix film), or the Audience Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Added to that are the individual awards earned by cast members such as Guitarricadelafuente or Carlos González.
But long before donning tuxedos to collect those awards, the pair of filmmakers already knew what it felt like to have their talent recognized: Javier Ambrossi was “seven or eight years old” when he won a prize for an essay on forgiveness at his priestly school. “The teacher told me: ‘Do you know that you write well?’ And I replied that I didn’t. That prize made me realize that I could write. Prizes can be an open door,” he confessed in an interview with Gold Derby magazine during the London Film Festival.
The first prize Javier Calvo won was for a school short film that he wrote, directed, and starred in. His theme was a bit more macabre. “It dealt with the accidental murder of the teacher and how to hide the body,” explained the co-director of The Black Ball. The prize? Free movie tickets for a year.
A Long Artistic Journey
Javier Calvo began his acting career very young in series such as Física o Química, while Javier Ambrossi studied Journalism and Dramatic Arts and worked in advertising and small roles. After meeting in 2010, they moved from micro-theatre to writing a small musical piece in the lobby of the Lara Theatre in Madrid that grew thanks to word of mouth. That was the germ of The Call, which earned five nominations at the Goya Awards in 2018.
The Javis, with their prize in Cannes.
Now, although they have ceased to be romantic partners but not collaborators, they have created together the film they could not watch while growing up. “We wanted to make the most gay and grand war movie in history,” Javier Ambrossi said during the press conference at the London festival. “We wanted to show that LGBTQ+ stories don’t have to be niche. They can be universal.”
But the fame they now enjoy inside and outside our borders does not make them forget the young people they were. “I would stop in front of every shoot I came across in Madrid and keep looking and dreaming of feeling part of this world,” recalled Javier Calvo. “I have to remember it when I am tired, when I feel overwhelmed. I have to go back and think of that boy.”
The Divas of The Javis
During their conversation with Gold Derby, they also discussed how in The Black Ball, Nené (Penélope Cruz) shows Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) that there is a world waiting for him beyond the war. “It’s the kind of door a diva opens to so many young gay people,” reads the magazine. Asked about their particular divas, Javier Calvo chooses Amy Winehouse (“from the beginning… I was obsessed”) and Javier Ambrossi chooses Julia Roberts (“I was obsessed as a child, and I still am”), though both stated that the one who really opened the doors for them was Pedro Almodóvar.
“We all need that moment when someone truly shows you a real path. It’s like saying: ‘Oh, you’re not alone’,” said Javier Ambrossi. When he watched the first film by the Manchego director, he recalls thinking: “Perhaps there are more people who feel like me. I will be eternally grateful to Pedro Almodóvar.” And Javier Calvo thinks of that boy who rented an Almodóvar DVD in his hometown and “suddenly felt less alone in the world.”
