Frida Kahlo’s Complex Life Gets A Unique Personal Spotlight In Compelling Documentary

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.

Pros

• 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.

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.

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.