‘I enjoyed hearing her sharp tongue’: a new Frida Kahlo documentary adds insight

The life of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is a story that has been told many, many times. Since she began to be rediscovered in the 1980s, there have been hundreds of books written about her, as well as several feature films telling her story from various angles. And then there are the art exhibitions – dozens since 2020 alone.

Kahlo’s story has been so welldocumented and so thoroughly disseminated that one wonders if it is even possible still to find a new angle on the artist. This is the sizable task that the longtime film editor and first-time director Carla Gutiérrez sets for herself in her new movie on the artist, simply titled Frida.

Gutiérrez’s attempts to make Kahlo’s story feel fresh are twofold: she has meticulously combed through the artist’s journals and other writings to let Kahlo tell her own story in her own words. Kahlo herself thus becomes the film’s primary narrative voice (in Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero’s affecting delivery). Kahlo’s world also becomes Frida’s primary visual reference point, Frida also makes rich use of archival footage from the period and from the life of Kahlo herself – much of it quite intimate and candid, it shows a much more personal and various side of the iconic artist.

In her second innovation, Gutiérrez makes the bold choice to bring animation to many of Kahlo’s paintings, letting them become a sort of set of ensemble actors in their own right. She shared that this was a choice she took with some trepidation. “It’s a hard decision to make when you’re dealing with an artist of Frida’s caliber, and how people feel about her,” Gutiérrez said. “It’s like dealing with a story like Star Wars that has so many fans.”

Gutiérrez’s animations act as relatively minor, yet meaningful, interventions into the Mexican artist’s work, along the lines of setting an insect buzzing, adding a pulse of movement to a canvas, bumping up the saturation, or even just slowly zooming in to a meaningful detail. For instance, on Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column, which depicts the artist’s ruined spine as a Greek column with innumerable cracks in it, Gutiérrez has intervened in two ways: she makes the column even more disjointed than in the original, and she