‘Frida’ seeks to enter the world, mind and heart of the painter to explain her intimate and raw art

Frida Kahlo used his experiences to create his art. In keeping with this spirit, Kahlo’s personal writings serve to tell his life story in a new documentary.

Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez combines first-person narration with archival footage and interpretive animations of Kahlo’s work in the documentary Fridacurrently available on Prime Video in the United States (and Brazil) and which will be released in theaters in Mexico on May 9.

Gutiérrez, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States when he was a teenager, remembers that the first time he connected with Frida’s paintings was in college.

“I was a young immigrant and there was a specific painting that really introduced me to her voice, where she appears as an artist on the border between the United States and Mexico,” Gutiérrez said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year. “I saw my experience of that moment really reflected in the painting. So she became part of my life.”

Gutierrez was an editor and was happy with this path in cinema. She worked on important projects such as documentaries RBG (2018) and Julia (2021), which allowed her to be intimately involved with creation. But when a director friend whispered Frida Kahlo’s name to her, she went back to her college books. Within hours, she was making plans to drive.

“I feel like this story really told me that I needed to step up and direct it,” she said. “I realized that she [Frida] it could tell a lot of its own story and I felt like that hadn’t been done yet. I hope it’s a new way to enter her world, her mind and her heart and really understand her art in a more intimate and raw way.”

Gutiérrez explained that Kahlo didn’t give many interviews during her life, but she wrote very intimate and personal letters. The filmmaker was impressed by her sense of humor, her sarcasm and irony, as well as “how explicit she was about her opinions.”

“It’s like messed up confidence and messed up feminism, in a way,” she said.

The film crew had to search museums around the world to find the letters that would be compiled to create a complete picture of the artist, including the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (where the correspondence with her mother were found) and the Philately Museum in Oaxaca, where letters she wrote to her doctor about everything from her complex marriage to her miscarriage were found.

One of the most important creative decisions was to animate Kahlo’s artwork, which has proven somewhat controversial since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Some love it, others aren’t convinced. But that was part of the film’s vision from its early stages. The hope, according to Gutierrez, was to transport the audience from the real world to Frida’s inner world.

“I always thought about his heart and his veins, going from his hands to the screen,” she said. “We wanted to be very respectful of the paintings, but at the same time introduce a lyrical animation so that it felt like we were really delving into her feelings and heart.”

Gutiérrez is especially proud of the fact that her collaborators are mostly Latino and bilingual. Composer Victor Hernandez Stumpfhauser is Mexican. The animation team is made up of Mexican artists and includes art director Renata Galindo.

“Injecting this cultural understanding of the country into the film is fantastic,” said Gutiérrez.

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