Javier Ambrossi, the director who turned Los Javis’ pop camp into a Cannes prize

Javier Ambrossi

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 24, 1984 Madrid, Spain
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	La Bola Negra, La Llamada
Awards	Cannes Film Festival (shared) · Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice · Premio Ondas · Premio Forqué

There is a version of Javier Ambrossi’s career that reads like a punchline: the jobbing actor with the curly fringe, cast as the boyfriend or the classmate in Spanish prime-time drama, who ended up teaching acting on a reality show and judging drag queens on television. There is another version in which the same man walked onto the stage of the Palais in Cannes to collect the prize for best director. Both are true, and the distance between them explains him. Alongside Javier Calvo, Ambrossi has spent his working life arguing that the camp, the pop chorus and the queer melodrama Spain’s cultural gatekeepers filed under entertainment could carry the weight of the country’s history. This year juries and audiences on two continents agreed with him, at the moment the partnership that produced the work stopped being a love story.

He was born Francisco Javier García de la Camacha Gutiérrez-Ambrossi in Madrid, the elder brother of the actress Macarena García, and he wanted to write long before anyone paid him to perform. He studied journalism at the Complutense University and dramaturgy at the RESAD drama school while acting paid the rent: commercials first, then the rotating guest parts Spanish television hands to young faces, in El comisario, Amar en tiempos revueltos and Cuéntame cómo pasó.

The roles that stuck were Gustavo in Sin tetas no hay paraíso and Cristiano in Ciega a citas, plus a lead in Mireia Ros’s El triunfo, a portrait of eighties Barcelona that went to Berlin; on stage he worked under Josep Maria Flotats in Beaumarchais. Born on 24 June 1984, he reached his late twenties with the kind of education that matters most to a director: years spent inside scenes built by other people, learning that the actor with three lines often sees the machinery most clearly.

The turn came through Calvo, a younger actor who became his partner in both senses. In 2013 the pair, soon known simply as Los Javis, staged La llamada, a musical about two teenage girls at a Catholic summer camp, in the lobby of Madrid’s Teatro Lara. A fringe show with no stars and almost no budget, it kept running for a decade, travelled to Mexico and became the 2017 film released abroad as Holy Camp!, which brought the pair Goya nominations for best new director and best adapted screenplay.

Paquita Salas, launched in 2016 on Atresmedia’s web platform Flooxer, sharpened the method. Brays Efe played a fading talent agent in a mockumentary format with little precedent in Spanish television; Netflix took the series from its second season, and it won a Premio Ondas. Veneno, in 2020, raised the stakes: a portrait of Cristina Ortiz, La Veneno, one of the first trans women to become a mass-media figure in Spain, adapted from Valeria Vegas’s memoir, with three trans actresses, Jedet, Daniela Santiago and Isabel Torres, sharing the title role across her life. Variety placed it among the year’s best international series, and it was the first production of the company the duo founded, relaunched in 2021 as Suma Content. Vestidas de azul, a continuation set around a forgotten documentary about six trans women, followed.

La mesías, made for Movistar Plus+ in 2023, went darker: a family thriller about a man whose religious childhood resurfaces through the viral video of a Christian pop group, and the series that won the Forqué award for best fiction series. In parallel, Ambrossi became a fixture of mainstream television. He and Calvo taught acting on Operación Triunfo in 2017, joined the panel of Mask Singer, have judged Drag Race España since its first season and co-hosted the Goya Awards in 2024.

That double life invited the obvious suspicion: that a duo so visible on reality television was making content rather than cinema, and that its sincerity was a brand. La bola negra did not settle the argument so much as export it. Guy Lodge in Variety dismissed the film as “turgidly overblown melodrama”, Justin Chang in The New Yorker called it a bust, and even sympathetic critics at Fotogramas found its final act heavy-handed and close to corny. The Cannes prize itself was shared, ex aequo, with Paweł Pawlikowski, a split some observers read as a jury admiring the ambition without wanting to rank it first. Ambrossi’s work courts excess on purpose. What his detractors call a lack of restraint is the point of the exercise: a refusal to make queer history tasteful so that it can be filed away.

The film is the largest thing he has made. Written with Calvo and the playwright Alberto Conejero, La bola negra grows out of the four surviving pages of an unfinished Federico García Lorca play about a young man blackballed from a Granada club, and moves between Granada in 1932, the Civil War front in 1937 and a historian’s search in 2017. Guitarricadelafuente makes his acting debut opposite Miguel Bernardeau, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 21 May 2026 and took the directing prize two days later, only the second time a Spaniard has won it after Pedro Almodóvar. In September it won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto, the first non-English-language film to do so in fifteen years, and Spain chose it as its submission for the international feature Oscar. Released in Spanish cinemas on 25 September, it passed 38 million euros and sold more tickets than any other film in the country this year.

The shoot was also where his private life changed. Ambrossi and Calvo, together for about thirteen years, separated during filming, and the news became public in November 2025 with both men committed to every shared project. On the evidence of this autumn, they meant it. Netflix, which bought the US rights after Cannes, opened the film in American cinemas on 16 October and will stream it from 2 December. On 4 November Variety gave the pair its Visionary Director Award at the Miami Film Festival GEMS, and the film is up for two Gotham Awards in New York on 30 November.

Through Suma Content, Ambrossi and Calvo are executive producers of an HBO Max drama inspired by the crimes and mysteries of Tor, a hamlet in the Catalan Pyrenees, written by Fran Araújo and Eduard Sola and developed with the journalist Carles Porta, while Le Pacte brings La bola negra to French cinemas on 16 December. The actor who once waited in the wings for the small part now decides which story Los Javis tell next, and for the first time the industry outside Spain is waiting to hear it.