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How the Documentary Frida Tells an Iconic Artist’s Story in Her Own Words

frida kahlo biography documentary

T he early 1940s self-portraits of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo that show monkeys wrapped around her neck may seem playful on the surface. In reality, Kahlo painted them during a suffocating period of her life when she was tangled in a messy divorce and desperate for work.

Frida , a new documentary produced by TIME Studios out in select theaters on March 7, explores how Kahlo endured several personal tragedies and fueled her experience into her art, creating the vibrant surrealist paintings and self-portraits that made her an iconic artist.

The film, which streams on Amazon Prime on March 14, brings Kahlo’s paintings to life through animation, archival footage, and snippets from the artist’s personal writings, billing itself as the first documentary to be told entirely through her own words as well as those of her intimates. Director Carla Gutierrez’s team scoured museums for Kahlo’s letters and used excerpts from the artist’s published diary, voiced by Fernanda Echevarría Del Rivero, in the film, which allows her sharp tongue to be put on full display. In her writings, she works through her feelings on men, the economics of art, the nature of independence, and the world. She lobs a critique at the U.S.: “Everything is about appearances but deep down it’s a pile of sh-t.”

While Kahlo’s story has been covered in biographies and films, Frida stands out for its innovative use of animation that makes her iconic paintings come alive.

Frida and self-portraits

Kahlo started painting after fracturing her pelvis in a bus crash when she was a teenager. “It wasn’t violent but silent. Slow,” she reflects in the film in voiceover. “The handrail went through me like a sword through a bull.” 

The crash altered everything. Kahlo spent months in a body cast—“bored as hell,” as she once put it—and her mother devised a makeshift easel that allowed her to paint in bed. She even hung a mirror over her daughter’s head so she could paint self portraits , which became a motif throughout her career. One reason Kahlo painted so many self portraits is because it was so painful to go out and about. “She was pretty immobile later in life, so the model that she had available was herself,” Gutierrez. In one excerpt from Kahlo’s writing that appears in the documentary, she describes her self-portraits as “the true expression of my emotions.”

How art became a lifeline for Frida Kahlo

The documentary shows that painting was a cathartic outlet for Kahlo when she was grieving after a miscarriage in 1932. In an emotional rollercoaster, she initially considered an abortion because she was afraid her body was too fragile to carry the fetus to term, but a doctor encouraged her to keep the baby. When she miscarried, she coped by painting, including the 1932 self-portrait “Henry Ford Hospital,” in which she’s lying in a pool of blood in a bed. As she once wrote, per the documentary, “the only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.” Kahlo suffered through two more miscarriages in her life.

“The paintings that came after that, that came from that loss and pain, are what actually made her find her voice as an artist,” says Gutierrez.

WITH AFP STORY BY PHILIPPE SIUBERSKI

Then Kahlo saw painting as necessary to support herself so she wouldn’t be dependent on her husband, the artist Diego Rivera , who married her in 1929 but had several affairs with other women, including Kahlo’s own sister. “I need to paint so I can make a living. Then I will be free,” she wrote, the documentary shows. “I no longer accept a damn cent from Diego. I will never accept money from any man until I die.” The couple divorced, but Rivera begged her to marry him again, and she agreed but continued to support herself with the earnings from her work and split household expenses. The 1937 self-portrait “Memory, the Heart” reflects her disappointment with Rivera, by showing a metal band piercing her heart and imps sitting on either end like they’re on a seesaw.

Kahlo struggled to sell paintings until she passed away in 1954 at the age of 47. But what’s clear is that painting was about much more than a paycheck. Per her words in the documentary, “I’ve painted little without the slightest desire for glory or ambition, with the sole conviction to give myself pleasure, and the power to make a living with my trade. I’ve lost so many things I wanted for my life, but painting completed my life.”

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Frida Kahlo’s story has been told and retold. A new doc captures the voice of the Mexican painter

A black and white photo shows Frida Kahlo in a floral blouse, blocking the sun from her eyes while laying in the grass.

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It’s the weekend and I’m dreaming about sushi from Waka Sakura in Gardena. I’m Carolina A. Miranda , art and design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, with all the raw fish and essential arts news:

A new take on Frida

Is it possible to know any more about Frida Kahlo than we already do? The 20th century Mexican painter placed her tumultuous life and her bodily pains on her canvases. Her husband, muralist Diego Rivera , incorporated her visage into some of his most famous murals . She was photographed relentlessly, even appearing in Vogue . And that was just in her lifetime. (Kahlo died in 1954 at the age of 47.)

Since then, she has been depicted in feature films by Mexican actors Ofelia Medina and Salma Hayek (in 1983 and 2002 , respectively), as well as in documentaries — most recently in director Louise Lockwood’s three-part series “Becoming Frida Kahlo.” She is also the subject of countless murals and other art. In Mexico City in 2016, I saw a fascinating installation by artist Juan Acha at the Museo de Arte Moderno that examined the ways in which Kahlo’s 1939 canvas “Las Dos Fridas” has been copied by fellow artists and appropriated by popular culture.

Kahlo’s work and her image have also generated endless mountains of merch (also addressed in Acha’s installation). Currently, sitting on my desk is a stack of Frida Kahlo-branded cosmetics I acquired at Walgreens several years ago — objects in search of an essay.

A mural shows an image of a gently smiling Frida Kahlo against a cosmic blue background.

All of this means that Peruvian-born director Carla Gutiérrez’s new documentary, “Frida , ” which landed this week on Prime Video , is entering a crowded field. Clocking in at almost 90 minutes, the doc provides a cursory overview of this well-chronicled artist. Certainly, the story of Kahlo could fill a set of encyclopedias: She came of age in the wake of the Mexican Revolution , was inspired by its mission to rethink the essence of Mexican culture, counted Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky among her lovers and produced groundbreaking paintings, inspired by folk traditions, that depict the devastations of womanhood. ( Hayden Herrera’s famous biography is more than 500 pages long.)

Like many Kahlo projects, Gutiérrez’s storyline rests on the broad narrative arc of Kahlo’s life. (If you’ve read Herrera’s biography, you’re probably not going to learn much.) But the film manages to stand out on a few fronts. For one, there are no awkward reenactments and no talking heads. Visuals consist exclusively of a mix of vintage footage and photography, along with Kahlo’s diaristic drawings and paintings — some of which are animated for added effect. Animating a painting can be cloying. (Can we let painting be painting?) But the filmmaker approaches her work with reverence. And the structure of the narrative, which centers Kahlo’s voice, drawn from her letters and diaries, makes the enterprise worthwhile.

A youthful Frida Kahlo sits smoking in a bare room underneath one of her self-portraits in a vintage black and white photo.

Often translations of Kahlo’s writings soften her language. But “Frida” lets Kahlo be Kahlo. She calls Rivera “la gran caca ” (the big s—) and describes wanting to be “f—” by a school crush. She trash talks the French surrealists and expresses profound disgust with Depression-era United States. “I am completely disappointed with the famous United States,” she states. “Everything here is about appearances, but deep down it’s truly s—. I’ve seen thousands of people in the most terrible conditions, without anything to eat or anywhere to sleep.”

The narration, wonderfully performed by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero , captures the musicality of Mexican Spanish — as well as Kahlo’s irreverent personality. It’s a nice break from often-depicted long-suffering martyr.

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If you’re dipping a toe into the world of Kahlo, “Frida” is a good introductory work. But if you want something deeper, I recommend turning to Lockwood’s docuseries “Becoming Frida Kahlo,” which aired on PBS last fall.

The documentary tracks down key players: biographer Herrera, along with historians Martha Zamora and Luis-Martín Lozano , Kahlo’s great-niece Cristina Kahlo and Rivera’s grandson Juan Coronel Rivera . In addition to Kahlo’s life, the series explores the artist’s influences, which include the politics of the era, as well as important female artists such as photographer Tina Modotti . (If you want to keep going down the rabbit hole, British film theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made an interesting, impressionistic short film in 1983 that compared the work of Kahlo and Modotti — including their interest in the matriarchal societies of Tehuantepec .)

But altogether, these documentaries show that there is always room for more — namely, a deeper exploration of Kahlo’s art, its roots and its resonances. Kahlo makes for an absorbing narrative, but just as fascinating is the social and political context that produced her — including complex racial politics that mythologized Indigeneity while also subsuming it to a broader mestizo culture . Kahlo’s story has been told and retold, but there are still pieces left to divulge.

“Frida” is now screening on Prime Video .

Musical chairs

There are so many big personnel moves in the world of fine arts this week, it’s hard to keep up with them all!

Here in SoCal, L.A. Opera announced that music director James Conlon will step down after the 2025-26 season. “I have a lot of energy left, a lot of passion left,” Conlon tells The Times’ Jessica Gelt . “And there are other things that I feel I have wanted to do and I just can’t.” His departure will coincide with that of the L . A . Phil’s Gustavo Dudamel — marking a sea change for classical music in the city.

James Conlon, wearing a black shirt, is seen sitting amid rows of red theater seats.

In the Bay Area, the big news is that Esa-Pekka Salonen is stepping down as music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 2025. In a statement to KQED , Salonen said he was leaving because “I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors.”

Joshua Kosman , classical music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle , theorizes that the COVID-19 pandemic put a dent in Salonen’s plans for the orchestra — turning what should have been a time of reinvention into one of survival — and he nods to the conductor’s tensions with the board. “Yet in spite of everything,” he writes , “the Salonen years have been a glorious time for Symphony audiences, full of musical adventure, discovery and luxurious execution.”

Meanwhile on the Right Coast...

Roberta Smith , the venerable co-chief art critic at the New York Times , has announced her retirement after 32 years at the paper. Over her tenure, she authored some 4,500 reviews and essays and was the first woman to hold the title of chief art critic. “In my coals-to-Newcastle-life,” Smith stated in an Instagram post , “I will have more time to pursue my number one interest, which is going to galleries and museums, looking at stuff.” Hyperallergic’s Valentina Di Liscia spotlights some of her career highlights .

Roberta Smith has ceremonial ribbons placed over her head during a graduation ceremony.

Tina Rivers Ryan , a curator who specialized in digital art at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum , was named the top editor at Artforum . This follows a period of turmoil after editor in chief David Velasco was fired for publishing an open letter in support of the Palestinian cause.

Performing arts

Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes that there are few plays more appropriate for our pandemic age than Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” Written in 1882, the story about a doctor-turned-whistleblower has been surfacing a lot as of late. It was recently reimagined by Theater of War Productions and Amy Herzog has written her own adaptation, which will soon premiere on Broadway. “The central conflict of ‘An Enemy of the People’ resonates in manifold ways today,” writes McNulty, “from the water crisis in Flint, Mich., to the political demonization of public health experts during the COVID-19 pandemic to the MAGA Republican effort to undermine truth itself.”

Four theater actors and creators — three men and one woman — sit staggered around a geometric, grey backdrop.

“The Last Repair Shop” is a remarkable, inspiring doc about the craftspeople who maintain the musical instruments for LAUSD — and on Sunday it won the Academy Award for documentary short . This marks the first-ever Oscar win for The Times, which produced the film. (!!!) Jazz critic Nate Chinen , who writes “The Gig,” has a great piece on the doc — and what it represents for co-director Kris Bowers , a jazz pianist and composer.

Do not miss this gorgeous little film. Watch “The Last Repair Shop” here .

In and out of the galleries

In 2020, Elizabeth Alexander launched the Monuments Project at the Mellon Foundation to help preserve and recontextualize monuments — as well as remove them when communities no longer deem them appropriate. This has resulted not just in a shift in the histories honored, but in what is considered a monument to begin with . “There are so many ways we mark spaces to tell stories,” says Alexander. A monument could be a boulder. It could also be a book.

Two Black women — Elizabeth Alexander and Rosie Lee Hooks — walk through the elaborate shadows cast by the Watts Towers.

Speaking of monuments, this story about clashes over an anti-abortion monument in Arkansas is all kinds of bananas .

Jori Finkel has an interesting article in the Art Newspaper about a new show of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work at Gagosian that focuses on the years that the artist spent in L.A.

Have you seen mysterious images of pink sheep around Los Angeles? Over on De Los , reporter Steven Vargas profiles artist Ricky Sencion — a.k.a. Little Ricky — who was inspired to paste them around the city after reading a quote by designer Alexander McQueen .

Design time

My colleague Lisa Boone looks into the latest in ADU design : a tight, 300-square-foot unit , tucked above a garage, by architects Jefferson Schierbeek and Su Addison , that make the most of smart storage areas, high ceilings and strategically placed windows.

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A building by architect Samuel Tilden Norton , designer of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple , is under threat of demolition. This week, the L.A. City Council voted to allow the destruction of the B’nai B’rith Lodge , completed in 1924, a Jewish landmark that later became an important organizing center for various labor unions. Preservationists and community advocates are urging Catholic Charities , which now owns the building, to repair and reuse it. The Times’ Angie Orellana Hernandez has the details .

A close up on the corner of a buildings reveals colorful tile and trim.

Student art on the Vegas Sphere ? The entity that manages the Sphere has announced a design competition for students of the Clark County School District and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas .

In more Esa-Pekka Salonen news, the San Francisco Symphony music director has won the Polar Music Prize .

Barry Hughson , of the National Ballet of Canada, is the new executive director of American Ballet Theater in New York.

Elizabeth C. Babcock has been named the inaugural director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum in Washington, D.C. She is currently the CEO and president of Forever Balboa Park in San Diego.

Dalila Scruggs has joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the museum’s first curator of African American art .

Edward Bond , a British playwright known for unsparing work depicting rage and violence, whose 1965 play “Saved” led to the end of British theatrical censorship, has died at 89 .

Lynn Fainchtein , who served as music supervisor on important Mexican films such as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma,” is dead at 61 .

In the news

— I’m very into photographer Fujio Kito’s Tumblr of Japanese playgrounds at night. — I’m also into this episode of the “Critics at Large” podcast about fictions set in the workplace. I’d add Netflix’s darkly hilarious “Carol & the End of the World” to their list, which is all about using office mundanity to while away time until an inevitable apocalypse . — Edward Zitron has an interesting essay on AI and the “Habsburg” internet, where originality goes to die . — A new study of Indigenous cave art in Puerto Rico shows that it is much older than previously thought . — Pablo Helguera has a rather comical dispatch on a conservation effort gone slightly wrong at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral . — A work by L.A. artist Charles Gaines featuring Palestinian scholar Edward Said was deinstalled then reinstalled at the ICA Miami , but it is unclear why . — Workers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have delivered a letter to museum leaders to address the destruction of cultural heritage sites in Gaza . — Dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta is reimagining “The Nutcracker” with a Cuban theme . — Every IKEA catalog since 1950 .

And last but not least ...

The best Kate Middleton Photoshop memes .

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frida kahlo biography documentary

Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist focused on art and design, who also makes regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books and digital life.

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Exploring the life of Frida Kahlo in her own words

Mandalit del Barco (square - 2015)

Mandalit del Barco

A new documentary about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo uses her own words to weave its story - drawing on her letters, diaries and interviews.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

A new film about the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo began streaming on Amazon Prime this week.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "FRIDA")

FERNANDA ECHEVARRIA DEL RIVERO: (As Frida Kahlo, speaking Spanish).

KELLY: Filmmaker Carla Gutierrez paints a portrait of the complicated artist with her own words. NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports.

MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Frida Kahlo died in 1954. And since then, there have been countless retellings of her life and art. I even produced a radio documentary for NPR in 1991.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Frida left behind images painted mostly on tiny bits of tin - graphic, sensual images of pain and longing.

DEL BARCO: In 2002, actress Salma Hayek starred in Julie Taymor's fictional film about Kahlo - her art, politics and tempestuous relationship with painter Diego Rivera.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FRIDA")

SALMA HAYEK PINAULT: (As Frida Kahlo, singing in Spanish).

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking Spanish).

HAYEK PINAULT: (As Frida Kahlo, singing in Spanish).

DEL BARCO: Most of these treatments have relied on actors or interviews with academics, art historians and contemporary artists, but Carla Gutierrez wanted a fresh take.

CARLA GUTIERREZ: Instead of having that historical distance of, like, other people explaining as - what she meant with her art, I really wanted to give that gift to viewers of, like, just hearing from her own words.

ECHEVARRIA DEL RIVERO: (As Frida Kahlo, speaking Spanish).

DEL BARCO: "I paint myself because that's who I know best," says the artist known for her selfies. Voiced by Mexican actress Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero, Kahlo's words are taken from handwritten letters and illustrated diaries in Spanish with English subtitles. Gutierrez says she wanted to get inside Kahlo's head.

GUTIERREZ: Like, what was she thinking? What was she feeling? And I felt that, as a Latina - somebody that grew up in Latin America - there was this connection that I have with the world that created Frida.

DEL BARCO: Gutierrez was born in Peru and saw her first Frida Kahlo painting as a college student in Massachusetts.

GUTIERREZ: Her impressions of the United States and yearning home, yearning for Mexico - that painting really reflected my own experience. And then I became obsessed, like millions of people around the world.

DEL BARCO: As an editor, Gutierrez has worked on documentaries on other what she calls badass women - the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, singer Chavela Vargas and chef Julia Child. But "Frida" is her first film as director. Gutierrez and her team combed through boxes stored by Hayden Herrera, who wrote the definitive Frida Kahlo biography in 1983.

HAYDEN HERRERA: Attics and closets. They came several times, and we had a good time. But I basically gave them all my research material.

DEL BARCO: That included transcripts of interviews with people who knew Kahlo. One of the film's archivists, Gabriel Reyes, also scoured university libraries, museums and private collections to find more material.

GABRIEL REYES: These letters often have little doodles on them - like, original Frida artwork - and she would, like, do kind of lipstick kisses on these letters.

DEL BARCO: In Mexico, another archivist, Adrian Gutierrez, was able to collect some rarely seen photos and footage of Frida and Diego together and Diego kissing another woman. There's footage of the Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata and of Red Cross workers in Mexico City bandaging trolly accident victims like Frida, who was famously injured as a teen. She painted about that and other pain she suffered.

ALEXA RAMIREZ: (Vocalizing).

DEL BARCO: Film composer Victor Hernandez Stumpfhauzer has created a soundtrack of modern electronic music with some folkloric flair and the ethereal voice of his wife, Alexa Ramirez. And Gutierrez has also made the decision to slightly animate some of Kahlo's paintings. Frida's open heart beats and bleeds. Tears roll down her face. And when she cuts her hair in desperation over her divorce, her scissors move, and pieces of her hair fall to the floor. The Salma Hayek film also animated Kahlo's work, but Herrera says doing so in a documentary was gutsy.

HERRERA: When I first saw the animation, I thought, oh, my God. This is - but then I found it really seducted and really added so much to the understanding of her painting. I found them very astute and actually quite witty, and they brought you closer to Frida.

DEL BARCO: Herrera says it's remarkable that Frida mania is still very much alive.

HERRERA: I think she would have been pleased that we're still talking about her, and I think she would have liked this film. Although seeing her own paintings animated might not be easy, she might have laughed and thought it was amusing.

DEL BARCO: Herrera says this latest documentary is her favorite telling of Frida Kahlo and is itself a work of art. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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In ‘Frida’ documentary, artist Frida Kahlo’s own words are used to tell her story

This image released by Amazon Prime shows artist Frida Kahlo from the documentary "Frida." (Amazon Prime via AP)

This image released by Amazon Prime shows artist Frida Kahlo from the documentary “Frida.” (Amazon Prime via AP)

This image released by Amazon Prime shows promotional art for the documentary “Frida.” (Amazon Prime via AP)

FILE - Mexican Artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo appear in New York on May 11, 1933. A new documentary “Frida” tells the story of Kahlo from her diaries and letters. (AP Photo)

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Frida Kahlo used her own experiences to inform her art. In that spirit, Kahlo’s personal writings are used to help tell the story of her life in a new documentary, “Frida.”

Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez blends first person narration with archival footage and interpretive animation of Kahlo’s work in the film, which is now streaming on Prime Video.

Gutiérrez, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States when she was a teenager, remembers first really connecting with Kahlo’s paintings in college.

“I was a new immigrant and there was one specific painting that really introduced me to her voice as an artist of her in between the border of the United States and Mexico,” Gutiérrez said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year. “I just saw my experience at the time really reflected in the painting. Then she just kind of became part of my life.”

Gutiérrez was an editor by trade and content with that path in filmmaking. She was working on meaningful projects like “RBG” and “Julia,” which allowed her to be intimately involved creatively. But when a director friend whispered Kahlo’s name to her, she went back and re-read one of those books she’d read in college. Within hours she was making plans to direct.

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Po, voiced by Jack Black, in a scene from DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 4." (DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures via AP)

“I feel like this story really just kind of told me that I needed to step up and direct this one,” she said. “I realized she could tell a lot of her own story and I felt like that hadn’t been made yet. Hopefully it’s a new way of getting into her world and in her mind and her heart and really understanding the art in a more intimate, raw way.”

Kahlo did not do many interviews herself over the years, Gutiérrez said, but she did write very intimate and personal letters. She was surprised by her sense of humor, her sarcasm and her irony as well as and “how explicit she was about her opinions.”

“It’s kind of like messy confidence and messy feminism in a way,” she said.

The filmmaking team had to search several different museums to find those letters that they would compile into a full picture, including the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. (where her correspondence with her mother was housed) and the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca, where they found her letters to her doctor about everything from her complex marriage to her miscarriage.

One of the biggest creative decisions was to animate Kahlo’s art throughout, which has proved a bit divisive since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Some love it. Some don’t. But it was part of the vision for the film from the earliest stages. The hope, Gutiérrez said, was to transport audiences from the real world into her internal world.

“I always thought about her heart and her veins just kind of moving from her hands into the canvas,” she said. “We wanted to be very respectful to the paintings but bring in lyrical animation to feel like we were immersing into her actual feelings and heart.”

She is also especially proud that her collaborators are mostly Latinx and bilingual. The composer is Mexican. The animation team is all women from Mexico.

“To inject this cultural understanding of the country into the film is fantastic,” she said.

frida kahlo biography documentary

In ‘Frida’ documentary, artist Frida Kahlo’s own words are used to tell her story

Frida Kahlo used her own experiences to inform her art

Frida Kahlo used her own experiences to inform her art. In that spirit, Kahlo’s personal writings are used to help tell the story of her life in a new documentary, “Frida.”

Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez blends first person narration with archival footage and interpretive animation of Kahlo’s work in the film, which is now streaming on Prime Video.

Gutiérrez, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States when she was a teenager, remembers first really connecting with Kahlo’s paintings in college.

“I was a new immigrant and there was one specific painting that really introduced me to her voice as an artist of her in between the border of the United States and Mexico ,” Gutiérrez said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year. “I just saw my experience at the time really reflected in the painting. Then she just kind of became part of my life.”

Gutiérrez was an editor by trade and content with that path in filmmaking. She was working on meaningful projects like “RBG” and “Julia,” which allowed her to be intimately involved creatively. But when a director friend whispered Kahlo’s name to her, she went back and re-read one of those books she’d read in college. Within hours she was making plans to direct.

“I feel like this story really just kind of told me that I needed to step up and direct this one,” she said. “I realized she could tell a lot of her own story and I felt like that hadn’t been made yet. Hopefully it’s a new way of getting into her world and in her mind and her heart and really understanding the art in a more intimate, raw way.”

Kahlo did not do many interviews herself over the years, Gutiérrez said, but she did write very intimate and personal letters. She was surprised by her sense of humor, her sarcasm and her irony as well as and “how explicit she was about her opinions.”

“It's kind of like messy confidence and messy feminism in a way,” she said.

The filmmaking team had to search several different museums to find those letters that they would compile into a full picture, including the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. (where her correspondence with her mother was housed) and the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca, where they found her letters to her doctor about everything from her complex marriage to her miscarriage.

One of the biggest creative decisions was to animate Kahlo’s art throughout, which has proved a bit divisive since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Some love it. Some don’t. But it was part of the vision for the film from the earliest stages. The hope, Gutiérrez said, was to transport audiences from the real world into her internal world.

“I always thought about her heart and her veins just kind of moving from her hands into the canvas,” she said. “We wanted to be very respectful to the paintings but bring in lyrical animation to feel like we were immersing into her actual feelings and heart.”

She is also especially proud that her collaborators are mostly Latinx and bilingual. The composer is Mexican. The animation team is all women from Mexico.

“To inject this cultural understanding of the country into the film is fantastic,” she said.

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A new film tells Frida Kahlo's story in her own words for the first time

Frida Kahlo biting a necklace

Frida Kahlo's distinct image and iconic paintings are omnipresent art symbols recognizable by most people even 70 years after her death, creating a false sense that everything there is to say about the Mexican painter has already been said.

But filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez cuts through that by doing what no one has done before in retelling the legendary artist’s story on-screen: use Kahlo's own words.

In her new documentary film "Frida," Gutiérrez uses the painter’s illustrated diary , intimate correspondence and candid print interviews to verbalize the artist’s innermost thoughts. Those emotions beautifully come to life through the lyrical animation of Kahlo's unforgettable artwork.

The combination of these elements in Gutiérrez’s feature film directorial debut results in a refreshing narrative that is as introspective as Kahlo’s paintings, most of which are self-portraits.

“I really felt that there was an intimacy that we could capture with our film and bring her in a different way to viewers,” Gutiérrez told NBC News. “For us, it was about always capturing the essence of Frida and her spirit.”

In the film, the earnest delivery of voiceover actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero as Kahlo allows the audience to feel an even bigger affinity to the artist, as if she was the one telling us her deepest secrets from her childhood and her adulthood.”

Kahlo’s voice has remained a mystery for years. There is one  recording believed to contain the sound and tone of the artist’s voice , according to Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, which archives old radio shows and other kinds of recordings. The Kahlo Family has denied this, saying that as far as they know, " there are no records of Frida’s voice ."

The voiceovers in "Frida" are effectively used to deliver poignant revelations about Kahlo and her life. At times, they are so personal, it almost feels like we should not be listening to them.

In her letters and diary, Kahlo wrote about the ups and downs of her relationship and marriage to acclaimed muralist Diego Rivera, her romance with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and some of her first memories questioning the Catholic faith, as well as gender roles.

Viewers also get to go inside Kahlo's mind as she recovered from a life-threatening accident that left her with fractures in her spine, leg, collarbone and pelvis — injures that resulted in multiple miscarriages and dozens of surgical procedures later in her life.

"There is a way of approaching biographies where you just list all the things that happen in somebody's life. But for me, it's really more important to capture the spirit of somebody and the emotional journey of that person," Gutiérrez said.

"Me and My Parrots" (1941) by Frida Kahlo.

To accomplish this, she and her team got unrestricted access to research materials that have never been shown to the general public before.

It took them two years to parse through everything and create a unique cinematic experience for those who have loved Kahlo for years and others who are just learning about her legacy.

Gutiérrez said the experience of reading Kahlo's writings and getting to know about her feelings firsthand "made me really feel her a lot, in a closer way, in a more intimate way.”

“It just made her into a more normal woman that is facing the normal things that we all face,” she said.

Audiences get to see, hear and feel a multitude of Kahlos — at times rebellious and seductive, fearless and defiant, lonely and vulnerable, insecure and fragile.

As a woman who lived with physical disabilities, explored and challenged gender norms, remained politically active and lived a tumultuous love life, the film provides a satisfying ending that makes us gain a new understanding of Kahlo's last painting: a still life of watermelons with the Spanish words "Viva la Vida" (Live Life).

It brought meaning to "that symbol, that sometimes is a little bit reductive," Gutiérrez said.

"Frida" will be available to stream on Amazon starting Thursday.

frida kahlo biography documentary

Nicole Acevedo is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.

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New Frida Kahlo Documentary at Sundance Doesn’t Even Scratch the Surface of a Complex Artist

By Maximilíano Durón

Maximilíano Durón

Senior Editor, ARTnews

A woman lying on grass with one arm over her eyes.

Carla Gutiérrez’s new documentary Frida would in theory be the right occasion to examine the full of Frida Kahlo ’s life. It is being given prominent placement at the Sundance Film Festival this week, and it is brought there by Amazon Studios—no small distribution company. Such a big canvas should provide a good opportunity to reexamine the famed Mexican artist, whose biography often feels stranger than fiction.

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Gutiérrez has said she came to make the film by diving deep into Kahlo’s archives: she read her diaries and colorized black-and-white photos. This is a noble cause, because ever since the rise of Fridamania beginning in the 1980s, we’ve lost sight of what makes Kahlo truly important.

As Carolina A. Miranda wrote in ARTnews in 2014, in an article called “Saving Frida Kahlo From Her Own Celebrity,” Kahlo’s overnight rise from “obscure Mexican painter to popular saint” had caused her mere mention to be met with disdain: “Recently, when I told a fellow art writer that I was working on a story about Kahlo, she replied, ‘You know, I kind of cringe when I hear the name.’” I’ve felt that way, too, in the past, not because I’m not a fan of Kahlo, but because few have been able to adequately deal with artist with such a complex legacy.

Recent exhibitions prove as much. A 2016 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, came closest to looking at Kahlo’s lens through a more critical and historical lens, but even that blockbuster was occasioned by the museum’s acquisition of its first Kahlo, as opposed to a serious curiosity about her art. Meanwhile, an exhibition about Kahlo’s fashion sense has been traveling since 2012, but it has failed to offer many insights, either, beyond attesting to how sharp of a dresser she was. Still, it has succeeded in drawing large crowds.

These shows often don’t feature enough of Kahlo’s own words, which is one of the few positives of the new documentary. There’s value to that, but she and her legacy still needs to be critiqued and analyzed. There’s a lot to unravel in Kahlo’s story, not just because her politics were complex and deliberately opaque at times, but also because she frequently self-mythologized, embellishing her own biography in ways that require interrogation. For the sake of this film, an easy fix would have been to bring in some experts, yet Gutiérrez does not do this.

In order to understand Kahlo and her art, it’s crucial to view it against the backdrop of post-Revolution Mexico. She was born in 1907, three years before the Revolution began, but at a certain point in her life, she redated her birth to 1910 so that she arrived in the world along with the Revolution. At a time when the new Mexican government was fixated on constructing a national identity through the arts—look no further than the work of Los Tres Grandes, the painters David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and her future husband, Diego Rivera—that is a significant detail, if not an essential one. Even if Kahlo was often dismissed as Rivera’s wife or a second-tier Surrealist painter during her lifetime, she was just as committed to the cause of a new Mexico. That goes unmentioned in the film.

A major theme in Frida is Kahlo’s own self-fashioning. Through her years in medical school, when she was the only woman member of a friend group called Las Cachuchas, she dressed decidedly butch. Kahlo met Rivera in 1928 and showed him four of her paintings. He was so taken by her that he almost immediately painted her into one of his murals.

They married the following year, and it was around this time that Kahlo began to dress more femininely, adopting the Tehuana dresses of the Indigenous Zapotec people as her everyday costume. Later on in the documentary, we learn that Rivera was acceptant of Kahlo’s bisexual identity. Her iconic painting Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), featuring the artist dressed like a man, flashes on screen. The year before she painted this, Kahlo and Rivera had divorced, only to remarry months later. This second marriage was intentionally devoid of sex (to avoid jealousy on Rivera’s part), likely meaning that now that Kahlo was no longer an object of Rivera’s desire, she was free to dress more freely. The film doesn’t provide enough information of how often Kahlo dressed in suits post-1940.

In 1930s Mexico, the act of adopting Tehuana dress was seen as just one more way to construct José Vasconcelos’s notion of la raza cósmica (cosmic race), in which all other races would amalgamate into a fifth one that would be superior to all others. Gutiérrez doesn’t address that history, or its neo-colonial, racist, and social Darwinist underpinnings, or even the simple fact that Kahlo’s appropriation of Tehuana dress and culture would have added insult to injury for a group that had by then been significantly impacted by land redistribution, displacement, and violence.

In general, Gutiérrez has a strange way of dealing with Kahlo’s politics. As a clip of a speech by Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, plays, we learn that Kahlo decided to join the Communist Party. Not much more is said on that front. Later in this mostly chronological documentary, we also hear that Kahlo and Rivera were instrumental in getting the Mexican government to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky, who lived at the couple’s Casa Azul for two years and with whom Kahlo had an affair. The details of their falling out with Trotsky are rushed in Frida , and Gutiérrez omits the fact that Kahlo and Rivera were initially suspected of carrying out Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, though they were later cleared. 

Between 1931 and 1933, Kahlo and Rivera lived in the United States as Rivera worked to complete several commissions. Gutiérrez does not elide how stylistically ambitious Kahlo was during this period. The filmmaker even takes the time to highlight the backstory of three quintessential Kahlo paintings: Henry Ford Hospital , My Dress Hangs There , and Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (all 1932), which filter Kahlo’s feelings of isolation in the US. Kahlo’s diaries do show that she found the wealthy commissioners of these paintings to be “rich jerks,” but the contradiction of a Communist hobnobbing with the elite goes uninterrogated, as it often does.

Bafflingly, at its end, Frida turns Kahlo’s death into a metaphor by considering one of her most famous paintings, The Wounded Deer (1946), in which Kahlo’s face is transposed onto the body of deer that has been shot with nine arrows. Painted eight years before her passing and a year after a major operation, the painting, as with other works from the era, like The Broken Column (1945), is a reflection on her declining health, a topic that became increasingly important to her after the death of her father in 1941.

Gutiérrez, however, treats this work differently. In one of the film’s 48 animations, she removes the arrows from Kahlo’s deer. This seems like a way of liberating Kahlo. In order for Kahlo to be famous, Gutiérrez appears to claim, she had to suffer. But that’s just a rehash of the uninspired trope of the tortured artist, and it isn’t very interesting.

A successful artist documentary should look at how the subject’s biography impacts their work. But it also shouldn’t be afraid to look at the subject’s warts—their failings, that which makes them human. Any subject is an unreliable narrator of their own biography, and it should be the job of someone like Gutiérrez to reveal myths rather than feeding them, as she does in the deer animation. Frida is a film that’s good at portraying what we think we know about Kahlo. Too bad it can’t also portray what we should know, too.

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Frida review – intimate dive into artist’s letters is raw and thrilling

Voiceovers of Frida Kahlo’s writing give us unprecedented insight into her life as she dealt with chronic pain, divorce, infidelity, miscarriage and commercial success

“I paint because I need to.” The revelation of this new documentary about Frida Kahlo (yes, another one) is the white-hot brilliance of her writing. On the voiceover, Kahlo tells her story in her own words, stitched together from letters, diaries and interviews (brought to life by Mexican stage actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero). The end result has a raw, thrilling intimacy.

Kahlo was rebellious by nature. As a little girl she tugged on the priest’s cassock: “Was the virgin Mary really a virgin?” At college, on course to become a doctor, she wore men’s suits; in old photos, she looks like a beautiful boy. Then came the life-changing accident that nearly killed her. Aged 18, Kahlo was travelling on a bus that collided with a tram. “The handrail went through me like a sword through a bull,” she remembers. In a hospital bed for months – “trapped alone with my soul” – she began painting. Kahlo’s intensely autobiographical canvases appear on screen as she describes the moods and events they depict.

Controversially, director Carla Gutiérrez animates some of Kahlo’s work. So the hair on the floor in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (painted after separating from her husband, Diego Rivera), comes to life, fluttering down to the ground. These bits have outraged some Kahlo fans. What’s all the fuss about, I wonder. Can it really be worse than plastering her work over tea towels?

Then there’s a fascinating section where Kahlo describes stepping out of Rivera’s shadow; it’s like a manifesto. After a devastating miscarriage, she became obsessed with “starting over” and “painting things how I saw them, through no one else’s eyes”. She regretted wasting “my best years on a man”. After divorcing, Rivera begged her to marry him again, and Kahlo agreed on two conditions: a) she would pay half of everything; b) they would never have sex with each other. (The infidelities on both sides had been epic: she slept with Trotsky; he slept with her favourite sister).

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman. There’s the anguish and vulnerability of living with chronic pain; Kahlo is scorchingly sexy too (her love letters practically pulse with desire). She is savage about her enemies (watch out Surrealists) and swears like a trooper. On a visit to New York, where the monied art world is fawning over Rivera, Kahlo sticks a pin in his ego: “Diego is big shit here.”

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Frida’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Wonderfully Immersive Documentary Dive Into Frida Kahlo’s Diaries

Where to stream:.

  • Frida (2024)

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Art of Love’ on Netflix, a Turkish Art-Heist Romantic Thriller

Stream it or skip it: ‘our christmas mural’ on hallmark, in which art helps heal grief and leave space for love, stream it or skip it: ‘vjeran tomic: the spider-man of paris’ on netflix, a must-see doc about the man who heisted $100m in paintings from the paris moma, you can own bob ross’ first-ever painting from ‘the joy of painting’ — for a whopping $9 million.

The number of films made about Frida Kahlo speaks volumes about her status as a cultural icon. Carla Gutierrez’s Frida ( now streaming on Amazon Prime Video ) is the latest of many documentaries about the Mexican painter, and the highest-profile Frida feature since Salma Hayek nabbed an Oscar nom for playing her in the 2002 biopic, also simply titled Frida . So let’s not get the two films confused as we dig into the new Frida , which really needed to set itself apart from the rest, and therefore consists wholly of archival footage and animated interpretations of her paintings and sketches, with interview material and excerpts from Frida’s diaries read by in-character voiceover actors. The result is a glimpse into her life that’s by no means comprehensive, but offers a revelatory intimacy that many will surely find stimulating.

FRIDA (2024) : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “I paint because I need to.” These are the first words we hear from Frida (voiced by Fernanda Echevarria), and the rest of the film rallies around that earnest thesis statement. It’s 1910, and young Frida already was an outsider, trying not to laugh when everyone else around her prayed, and asking the local priest pragmatic questions about whether the virgin Mary was actually a virgin. She went to preparatory school to become a doctor, where she was one of very few girls in attendance – and where she dressed in a tie and pants and slicked her hair back to look more masculine, and either scraped by with crummy grades or cheated to get good ones. She met a boy named Alejandro and fell in love; he was a traditional romantic, but she – and these are her own words – wanted him to f— her, and this is our introduction to her voracious sexual appetite.

Frida was with Alejandro in 1925 when her life changed suddenly and radically. They were riding on a bus when it collided with a trolley. Frida was impaled by an iron railing. They couldn’t hear the ambulance over her screams. The doctors didn’t expect her to survive. She was trapped in a body cast in a hospital for an ungodly length of time that surely felt longer for a woman who relished personal freedom like she did – and one could argue that she never took such freedom for granted again. To cope with the agonizing confinement and immobility, her mother set up an easel so Frida could draw and paint in bed, and so she made portraits of her friends from school, and of herself. 

Frida would live with the pain of the incident for literally every day of the rest of her life – and that pain would be the primary theme of her art. She brought four of her paintings to famed Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1927, and he not only praised them, but also fell in love with her. And she with him, and if you’re wondering about the sincerity of his praise, Frida reveals that he soon was asking her opinion of his work, and taking her advice. She set aside her menswear and began wearing dresses for Diego, which speaks on her desire to neatly fit into his life, symbolizing how she existed in his shadow for many subsequent years, as they married and worked through the uberdrama of an open relationship that nevertheless spawned jealousy and turmoil. She traveled with him to New York and Detroit, where she learned to loathe the rich Americans ponying up for Diego’s commissions: “Stuck-up gringos,” she spits. “Motherf—ers. Sons of bitches.”

While in Detroit, Frida learned she was pregnant, and feared that her broken body wouldn’t allow her to carry to term. A doctor talked her out of aborting the fetus, and she suffered a brutal miscarriage that left her an emotional wreck, and prompted her to dive headlong into her art. All this time, she kept painting, painting, painting, admitting that she adopted Diego’s style. But it wasn’t until her marriage to Diego dissolved – what finally ended it? Her affair with Leon Trotsky, his affair with her dearest sister, Cristina – that she was compelled to follow her own muse, partly out of a desire to establish independence, partly because she needed to sell paintings to pay the bills. She eventually established her own identity as a world-renowned artist – she was lumped in with the surrealist movement, although she wasn’t aware it existed until Andre Breton curated exhibitions of her work in the late 1930s – and as an art teacher at a school in Mexico. She also did her damnedest to live with the increasingly debilitating physical pain that would torment her until her dying day.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I risk courting snobby-art-world critics by saying this, but the last time I saw a documentary about a painter with an instantly recognizable image who was horny as hell and became an icon after dying relatively young? Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed . 

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: On paper, hiring a voice actor to read Frida’s diary seems a step cheesier than the cheapo reenactments we often see in documentaries. But Echavarria sells it, giving Frida a voice and persona that’s a necessary component of the film.  

Memorable Dialogue: Frida’s incredibly horny recipe for happiness: “Make love, take a bath, and make love again.”

Sex and Skin: Nudity in Frida’s paintings; various verbal references.

Our Take: To know Frida with the intimacy this documentary offers is to absolutely fall in stupid, irrational, head-over-heels love with her. Here in the 21st century, Frida’s striking visage has become a meme and a T-shirt and a symbol of various social causes, and it’s therefore a wonderful experience to go a little deeper, to step inside her mind a bit and experience some scorching Frida Heat: Her lust, her physical pain, her passion to paint, paint, paint. And she apologized for none of it. The film presents her as unequivocally herself, a profanity-spewing, profoundly suffering woman who painted self-portrait after self-portrait, because that’s what she knew the best, and because, from our perspective at least, there was nothing in this world as distinctively beautiful, or mysterious, or poignantly soulful as her face. 

This Frida is by no means a thorough biography about how the woman’s joys and tragedies informed each other so profoundly, surely because that’s been done before; a fresh, unusual approach to documentary filmmaking seems like a mandate for material that’s been explored many times before. Gutierrez will raise eyebrows (and unibrows) for committing blasphemy and turning Frida’s paintings into animated graphics, but why spend precious movie run time staring at works we can easily look up after the credits roll? Her goal is to immerse us in Frida’s life and imagery, and seeing animated roots sprout from her self-portraits, and monkeys squirming in her arms as she stares unblinkingly into the camera, is a strange and wonderful experience, a beckoning to look closer, to consider the artist’s motives, and, most importantly, to feel what she was feeling. 

The voiceover-actor gambit pays off as well, injecting some melodrama – again, some welcome sweaty heat – into the by-nature dry documentary format. Gutierrez invites further criticism by essentially “colorizing” black-and-white footage of life in Mexico in the 1910s and ’20s, filling in images with yellows and reds, as if Frida was coloring the world around her. This is the filmmaker making significant creative choices – and making the first-person bio come alive vividly and memorably. Few documentary filmmakers show the courage to so egregiously toy with form and style; this is Gutierrez channeling the spirit of her subject, lusciously, unapologetically.

Our Call: Frida is wonderful. It may inspire newcomers to dive deep into Frida’s life and work; it may offer the familiar a delightful new perspective on the woman. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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frida kahlo biography documentary

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Frida review: frida kahlo’s complex life gets a unique personal spotlight in compelling documentary.

Frida explores the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo using her own words, painting a compelling picture of her life in this striking documentary.

  • Frida explores the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, using both her art and her writings to reflect her complex life.
  • Narratives from her diary entries and letters provide insight into how her life influenced her art.
  • The documentary combines real-world visuals with Kahlo's paintings to capture the essence of her intertwined life and art.

Artist Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognizable Mexican painters in history. Known for the portraits and self-portraits she painted throughout her life, she utilized surrealism to create art that was both historical and autobiographical. In addition to her paintings, she wrote extensively about her life in diary entries, letters, and essays, crafting a much larger view of who she was as a person. All her work intersects in Frida , a 2024 documentary directed by Carla Gutiérrez about her life told through the words and images she created.

Frida is a documentary film by director Carla Gutierrez released in 2024. Gutierrez takes viewers on a journey through the life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo by narrating it from the first person and using various narrative devices such as animations and interviews to help explore her world as she saw it.

  • Frida adds complexity to the painter's life by using her own words
  • Through moving artwork & narration, Kahlo's life is deeply explored
  • Frida has a great visual style that makes for a compelling watch
  • Frida captures how Kahlo's life and art informed one another

Frida Is A Stylistic Display Of An Artist's Life

Kahlo's paintings and writings are on full display..

While Frida shares the same name as the 2002 film where Salma Hayek plays the titular artist, the documentary has a clear focus on Kahlo's own words and paintings. Stylistic animations breathe vivid life into her most famous artwork, turning them into living parts of the documentary. These works are presented at various points throughout her life, oftentimes reflecting the intersection between her experiences and her creations. While the decision to animate her paintings is an unusual one that takes some getting used to, their lively presentation resonates with the documentary's purpose.

These animations are accompanied by a narrative woven within her writings, read throughout by actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. Diary entries and letters reveal the extent to which the positive and negative elements of her life influenced her creations. They make up the backbone of the film's narrative, telling the story of her life experiences through an autobiographical perspective. Kahlo's artwork and writings compliment one another, revealing just how influential the complexities of her personal life were with her art.

Frida (2024)

Beyond what she herself created, the documentary bolsters the narrative of Kahlo's life with photos and videos of her spanning nearly five decades. These real-world visuals help highlight the documentary's purpose as an examination of her life through her own eyes. They also provide a contrast between the surrealist, oftentimes fantastical world of her artwork to the grounded nature of reality. By using photos and videos of her, Frida expertly captures the essence of how her life and art intertwined throughout the years.

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Frida reveals the captivating story behind the famous mexican artist, the artist's personal life is a major focus of the documentary..

The Prime Video documentary captures the essence of who Kahlo was as a person, both within herself and to those around her. Frida displays her questioning, rebellious attitude, notably through her interactions with religion and sexuality throughout her life. These make their way into her personal life, and thereby her paintings, offering a close study of her relationship to these topics through her own eyes. The same form of presentation appears as parts of her life are explored, such as a life-altering accident and a tragic loss after her marriage.

The intersection between her real-world experiences and their reflections in her artwork make the documentary as close as the world will come to knowing how she felt through the many stages of her life.

One engrossing, focal section includes her relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera , whose murals were just as renowned as Kahlo's paintings. These moments showcase how Kahlo fit into the wider world of Mexican art in the early 20th century, as constructed through her often imperfect marriage. They're also contrasted with other, more tender moments in the form of her love letters, their varied prose revealing her innermost desires. While this occasionally leads to some repetitious moments in the documentary, they prove important to understanding Kahlo beyond her artwork.

With a variety of art and writings reflecting her life, Frida takes an honest look at the complex painter through her own eyes in a creative and informative way. The intersection between her real-world experiences and their reflections in her artwork make the documentary as close as the world will come to knowing how she felt through the many stages of her life. While the information on display may be familiar to those who know of Kahlo, her own perspective is a powerful one. Informative for newcomers and the familiar, Frida is a must-watch biography.

Frida is now available to stream on Prime Video.

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The ‘Frida’ Documentary Animated Kahlo’s Paintings. Deal with It.

Mark peikert.

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At the world premiere of Frida during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, audiences couldn’t stop talking about director Carla Gutierrez’s choice to animate Frida Kahlo’s paintings throughout the documentary about the artist — and not always in a good way.

“We knew that it was a bold decision,” Gutierrez told IndieWire of the conversation that sprang up around the film. “Obviously, when you’re putting out a film and you’re getting the first reactions, you take them really intensely, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But we had so many conversations about what we meant and what we wanted to do with animation , that a lot of the things that people brought up or questioned were actually questions that we posed ourselves through the process.”

“The concept was it’s her voice,” Gutierrez said. “So, her voice is also the art, right? That’s the way that I always thought about it. So it’s her voice in every way. From the very, very beginning, it was like, ‘How do we show her internal world?’ She can carry a lot of her story with her own words. But what are the ways that we’re going to be able to immerse ourselves in her internal world and her emotions?”

The animation of Kahlo’s paintings provides a surprisingly deep appreciation of her inner turmoil but also a visceral sense of the freedom that painting gave her. In Kahlo’s own words (heard in the exclusive clip below), “painting completed my life.” The documentary then cuts to several of Kahlo’s paintings, all subtly animated in ways that force us to engage with them in a fresh way.

“As we see Frida painting at the end of her life and we hear her tell us how art completed her life in the face of so much loss, I wanted to show emblematic paintings that portrayed the grief and loss during Frida’s lifetime,” Gutierrez said. “’The Tree of Hope’ represents the many surgeries she underwent in the last years of her life. ‘Memory’ is about the heartache she suffered during her separation from Diego Rivera. ‘Henry Ford Hospital’ is about the loss of a pregnancy. ‘The Broken Column’ shows her broken body because of a brutal accident when she 16. These were the losses Frida suffered, but painting her experiences allowed her to release her pain and find catharsis.”

The ways in which we interact with art in museums or galleries are more immediate than in the flat, two-dimensional ways they appear in film, which raised a question for Gutierrez as she worked on “Frida”: “How do we guide the audience through the art so that they pay attention to that emotional detail in the painting that I want them to pay attention to within the narrative?” Gutierrez said, pointing out the ways in which the film’s animation seeks to circumvent that barrier and bring the same sense of immediacy to Kahlo’s work as when viewing it in person.

“It was just so wonderful to be in collaboration with this group of Mexican women animators,” Gutierrez said. “We were kind of a little obsessive with our research. When we were grading the color of our paintings, we had the Taschen Frida book. [But the animators] would go to Casa Azul to look at the color of the actual paintings because we weren’t sure about the published color. So yeah, it’s a little obsessive!”

“Frida” is now streaming on Prime Video.

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Documentary offers a close-up on the foul-mouthed Frida Kahlo

New film about the mexican artist quotes extensively from her unguarded, strident diaries and notebooks.

Take no prisoners: Gutiérrez’s documentary draws heavily on Kahlo’s diaries and notebooks, which reveal a disdain for those who crossed her or her husband, Diego Rivera Photo: Lucienne Bloch; Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Take no prisoners: Gutiérrez’s documentary draws heavily on Kahlo’s diaries and notebooks, which reveal a disdain for those who crossed her or her husband, Diego Rivera Photo: Lucienne Bloch; Courtesy of Sundance Institute

In the documentary Frida (2024), which had its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the director Carla Gutiérrez exhumes Frida Kahlo’s voice, relying mostly on the artist’s words from her diaries and notebooks to portray the woman behind the images that she made. The “Frida effect” has been with us for decades, with exhibitions all over the world, merchandise of every sort, auction prices in the stratosphere and polemics for her lasting role as a prophet of self-portraiture, feminism, Surrealism and sex.

Gutiérrez brings skill as an editor—as evidenced in previous efforts such as the Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Julia Child documentaries RBG (2018) and Julia (2021)—to her directorial debut, weaving in photographs from throughout Kahlo’s life, and animations of drawings and paintings, along with her most famous images. Kahlo’s words here say more about her life than her art, and the film aims at a huge public. The documentary’s executive producers include Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who collaborated on Splash (1983), Apollo 13 (1995), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and many other mainstream movies.

Gutiérrez has said she looked into the latest academic writings on Kahlo, with the biographer Hayden Herrera credited as a consultant. Herrera’s 1983 book, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo , was also the basis of Frida , the 2002 narrative feature directed by Julie Taymor, with Salma Hayek in the title role.

Performance and pain

Gutiérrez’s film is more distillation than deep dive, more descriptive than groundbreaking. It presents Kahlo’s youth as a period of performance and pain. The daughter of a religious mestizo mother and an atheist photographer father, young Kahlo went to a school where the other pupils were mostly boys, and she often dressed as one in three-piece suits.

Her life was shattered in 1925, when a bus in which she was riding collided with a streetcar, sending a shaft of metal into her body, almost killing her. She lived in pain for the rest of her life. Her injuries, a persistent subject of her work, get the added treatment of animation. Gutiérrez is not the first film-maker to add movement to works of art. One wonders whether Kahlo’s work needs that kind of enhancement, and whether we get closer to the real Kahlo when monkeys dance around her playing hide-and-seek.

Kahlo’s leftist politics owe much to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 led by Emiliano Zapata, which turned her into a communist, albeit an unorthodox one. We see her in a drawing, nude and dreaming of Diego Rivera, another communist. During this period, she adopted the Indigenous Tehuana dress that became an integral part of her iconography and figured in her paintings, setting her apart when “Mrs Diego Rivera” travelled to New York in 1932 with her husband for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. There, she was viewed with curious condescension as “birdlike” and was said to “gleefully dabble” in painting.

Privately, Kahlo noted that “Diego is the big shit here”, but “high-society people lead the most stupid lives… they all spout nonsense and brag about their millions”.

‘Rich jerks’

The film includes a section on the couple’s trip to Detroit for a mural commission—“unfortunately, Diego has to work for these rich jerks”. Kahlo found herself pregnant and, deciding against abortion, which would have been illegal in the US, had a miscarriage in July 1932 in the Henry Ford Hospital. She portrayed herself bleeding in bed at the time, with an ashen-skinned baby sitting alongside her.

Back in New York, after receiving a commission to paint murals for Rockefeller Center, Rivera was fired for insisting on depicting Vladimir Lenin in one of them. In this passage, Kahlo calls her hosts “stuck-up gringos”, “motherfuckers” and “sons of bitches”.

Upon returning to Mexico, Kahlo was unabashedly bisexual and sex-positive, declaring that “it’s good to have sex even if it’s not for love”. In 1937, she painted Leon Trotsky, who bored her as a lover. The film ignores his assassination, for which she was arrested and later released. (It also ignores her ardour for Stalin.) Other lovers allegedly included Paulette Goddard, once the wife of Charlie Chaplin. After Rivera seduced Kahlo’s sister Cristina, the couple divorced in 1939, then remarried a year later, agreeing on a bond without sex.

André Breton, who considered Kahlo a Surrealist, gave her a show in Paris. But, angry that Breton put her work alongside Mexican knick-knacks, she said: “I hate Surrealism. It’s a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art.”

Later, she predicted: “I believe that after my death I’m going to be the biggest piece of shit in the world.”

Like so much in popular cinema, Frida is character-driven and full of close-ups. She could paint, she could talk and she could curse like a sailor. We will now find out if anyone did not already know that.

• Frida will be available to stream worldwide on Amazon Prime Video from 15 March

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Becoming Frida Kahlo

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Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray in Becoming Frida Kahlo (2023)

This immersive series delves into Frida Kahlo's world, revealing an artist driven by politics, power, sex & identity, while at the heart of it beats her epic love affair with Diego Rivera. This immersive series delves into Frida Kahlo's world, revealing an artist driven by politics, power, sex & identity, while at the heart of it beats her epic love affair with Diego Rivera. This immersive series delves into Frida Kahlo's world, revealing an artist driven by politics, power, sex & identity, while at the heart of it beats her epic love affair with Diego Rivera.

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Artist Frida Kahlo poses for a portrait at the home and studio she shares with her husband, Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo Documentary: When Did the Mexican Painter Artist Start Painting?

By Debangshu Nath

A new documentary titled  Frida  will be released on Prime Video on March 14, 2024. This project delves into the life of the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. According to  Time Magazine , Kahlo’s story will be narrated through archival footage, animation, and clips from the artist’s writings.

According to  IMDb , the documentary’s synopsis reads, “A raw and magical journey into the life of iconic artist Frida Kahlo, told through her own words from diaries, letters, essays, and interviews. Vividly brought to life with lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork.”

At the age of 18, Frida Kahlo met with a gruesome bus accident. The damage was so severe that Kahlo lived with the pain throughout her life. However, this is when she discovered her passion for painting. In the documentary, she says, “It wasn’t violent but silent. Slow. The handrail went through me like a sword through a bull.”

In a body cast and bored, Kahlo’s mother helped her set up a makeshift easel. In addition, she even hung a mirror over her daughter’s head so that she could paint self-portraits. Later on, self-portraits would become that painter’s motif.

How did art become so important for Frida Kahlo?

Time Magazine reported that the upcoming documentary features the painting that Kahlo created after a miscarriage in 1932. After the tragedy, she painted the famous self-portrait called Henry Ford Hospital. This heartbreaking artwork showcases her lying in a bloodied bed. She once famously said, “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.” Unfortunately, the painter suffered two more miscarriages.

Notably, Frida Kahlo saw painting as an outlet to support herself and not depend on her husband, Diego Rivera. He and Kahlo tied the knot in 1929. Rivera’s infidelity eventually culminated in the couple’s divorce. However, they remarried after Rivera’s persistence.

In the upcoming documentary, Kahlo says, “I’ve painted little without the slightest desire for glory or ambition, with the sole conviction to give myself pleasure, and the power to make a living with my trade. I’ve lost so many things I wanted for my life, but painting completed my life.”

Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, at the age of 47. Some of her last paintings include Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, Frida and Stalin, and Viva La Vida.

Debangshu Nath

Debangshu watched a couple of Scorsese, Tarantino and Coppola films in seventh grade and developed an unhealthy obsession with criminals, psychopaths and serial killers. Fueled by his passion for Death, Thrash and Black Metal, he finds solace in writing about some of the most deranged people and incidents in human history. He also thinks he is a combination of Michael Scott, Dwight Schrute, Ron Swanson and Travis Bickle.

Thank God for Cats and Prairie dogs.

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