Frida Kahlo used her 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 Gutierrez blends first-person narration with archival footage of Kahlo’s work and interpretive animation 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 the first time she connected with Kahlo’s paintings in college.
“I was a new immigrant and there was a specific painting that really introduced me to her voice as an artist between the border of the United States and Mexico,” Gutierrez said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year. ” “I really saw my experience at that time reflected in the painting. Then in a way she became a part of my life.
Gutiérrez was an editor by trade and content and was on his way to film production. She was working on meaningful projects like “RBG” and “Julia”, which gave her the opportunity to be involved creatively. But when a director friend whispered Kahlo’s name to her, she went back and re-read one of the books she’d read in college. Within hours she was planning to direct.
“I feel like this story really tells me that I need to step up and direct it,” he said. “I realized she could tell a lot of her own story and I felt like she wasn’t done yet. Hopefully this is a new way to enter her world, her mind and her heart and really understand art in a more intimate, raw way.
Kahlo herself didn’t give many interviews over the years, Gutierrez said, but she wrote very intimate and personal letters. She was amazed by his sense of humor, his sarcasm and his irony as well as “how outspoken he was about his opinions.”
“It’s kind of like messy confidence and messy feminism,” she said.
The film production team had to search several different museums to find the letters that they would compile into a complete picture, including the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, and the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca. Including the museum, where they found letters written to her doctor about everything from her complicated marriage to her abortion.
One of the biggest creative decisions was to bring Kahlo’s art to life, which has proven a bit divisive since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Some like it. Don’t do anything. But this was part of the vision of the film from the very beginning. The hope, Gutierrez said, was to take the audience from the real world into her inner world.
“I always thought about his heart and his veins running through his hands through the canvas,” she said. “We wanted to be very respectful of the paintings, but bring in lyrical animation to make it feel like we were diving into their real emotions and hearts.”
She is also particularly proud of the fact that her colleagues are mostly Latinx and bilingual. The musician is Mexican. The animation team is all women from Mexico.
“It’s great to incorporate this cultural understanding of the country into the film,” he said.
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