The BFI London Film Festival audience has voted La Bola Negra its favourite feature, and few festival prizes belong so plainly to the people who made the film. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the writing-directing pair Spain calls Los Javis, keep winning the ballot that suits how they started out, the one cast by people who bought a ticket.

Abroad, they arrived as strangers. Ambrossi has told the Associated Press that Cannes director Thierry Frémaux greeted the film with a compliment and a question: “I love this movie. Who are you?” At home the question would have sounded absurd. Both began as actors, and Calvo is best known in Spain for the teen series Física o Química. Together they created the television series Paquita Salas and Veneno, made the feature Holy Camp!, sat on the judging panel of Drag Race España and hosted award shows. The public knew them long before the festival circuit did.

A run of festival prizes decided by audiences

Cannes, where they shared the best director prize with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland, was the jury’s moment. Since then the film’s path has run through audience ballots. Toronto gave it the People’s Choice Award in September, which Netflix says made it the first title from the streamer to take the prize and the first international film to win in 15 years. In San Sebastián the audience award came with a score of 9.4 out of 10, according to Netflix the highest a Spanish film has received there, and the distributor lists audience prizes in Busan and Sydney too.

London repeated the split. Its juries gave the official competition to Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium; the public went to the Spanish epic. “To receive this recognition from audiences is particularly meaningful,” Los Javis said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, thanking “everyone who came to see it and voted for us.” In Toronto they had not been there to collect the prize, and a note read by festival chief Cameron Bailey said much the same: that audiences making the film “their own is the greatest gift we could receive.” In London they came in person, presenting the gala screening alongside Penélope Cruz, Miguel Bernardeau and Guitarricadelafuente, the singer-songwriter making his acting debut.

The partnership that nearly ended at the finish

The prize goes to a duo that almost stopped being one. Calvo and Ambrossi were a couple for years, the AP reported. They separated romantically as they completed La Bola Negra and decided to go their separate ways professionally too, then changed their minds before Cannes. “I don’t know what it is to be a director if he’s not there,” Ambrossi told the agency. Calvo was more succinct about the shared directing award: “We won best director, the two of us. Très chic.”

The double signature is also how they explain the film’s scale. The AP puts the budget at $15 million, a modest sum for a story that crosses the Spanish Civil War, and Ambrossi credits the partnership: “Being two really helps you. You can do more with less.” He told Netflix’s Tudum that the structure was locked at the writing stage, with “even the cuts” already in the script. For an auteur reading, that is the telling detail. Their authorship sits in the architecture, the three eras of 1932, 1937 and 2017 written to interlock before a frame was shot.

Lorca, Almodóvar and an Oscar campaign

The title comes from an unfinished work by Federico García Lorca, and the pair co-wrote the screenplay with playwright Alberto Conejero, drawing on his play La piedra oscura. Pedro Almodóvar is a producer, and Glenn Close joins Cruz in the cast. “It’s a way of honoring our grandparents and our LGBTQ elders,” Calvo said.

The film is Spain’s official submission for best international feature, and The Hollywood Reporter now calls it a real threat to The Odyssey in the best picture race. Netflix, which won the bidding war after Cannes, has given it a 46-day exclusive theatrical window, the longest the company has granted.

The festival ran from October 7 to 18 for its 70th edition, which reported its highest-ever attendance. Grace Harper Brighouse’s documentary Dependence took the audience award for best British discovery. Altitude releases La Bola Negra in UK and Irish cinemas on November 6, and Netflix begins streaming it in the US and Canada on December 2.

Frémaux asked who they were. Audience after audience has answered with a ballot, and on Friday the British public starts answering with tickets.