Frida

Watched this at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Frida Kahlo is one of the most interesting painters as he background and history is pretty strange yet interesting to learn about. This documentary does an wonderful job on presenting the life of Frida with strong direction, good dialogue read from the excerpts of her diaries that lets us go into the mind of Frida, and strong visual presentations throughout. Filmmaker Carla Gutierrez presents a good insight of Frida Kahlo with interesting presentation choices, structures and documentary vibes throughout which I found to be purposeful and insightful.

I have known about Frida when I was in art classes as a kid and I had seen the feature film about her but this documentary provided some new aspects and ideas about what made her special that I didn't know about. The narration felt poetic and the uses of sound designs and music are really compelling that helps to add the feel to the documentary.

Overall really good.

I was fortunate to attend a sneak preview of this film the other day in a theatre. What a great experience. The movie is narrated from Frida's notebooks, and you really feel like you know her after seeing this remarkable film.

It utilizes her paintings in an innovative way. Adding animation to these scenes really brings her story to life. I knew she was in a tragic accident when she was young, but I had no idea just how much it affected her life. And it gives you a clear picture of what a self-centered jerk Diego Rivera was.

But you also have a great deal of admiration for Frida as an artist, and also as a Bohemian personality. What a life!

MovieJunkieMark.

A current documentary airing on Prime about the famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Using her own words from her writings, observations & even her own artwork to trace her beginnings as a young girl who fell into art, mostly doing portraits of herself, becoming the sole young woman in her art school attendance. Never gaining much traction w/her work & the public, she did find comradeship w/Diego Rivera, her vaulted fellow countryman who even put her in one of his murals. Seeing this newfound attention got her her own show but soon enough the lack of sales & the pretentiousness of the clientele made her long for home coupled w/the fact that her marriage to Rivera was on the rocks, made the decision an easy one especially since she was becoming gender fluid w/her bed partners while also going through numerous spine operations (due to a railcar accident she endured when she was younger). Never completely losing her will to recreate, she continued working even while confined to a wheelchair, to her final days where now she's become the iconoclast she may've secretly already knew she'd become since a biopic starring Salma Hayek (who got an Oscar nomination) was made 2 decades ago & she's becoming a visual icon (a nice use of her likeness appeared in Pixar's Coco) forever equating her art & homeland as intertwined.

As "Frida" (2024 release; 84 min.) opens, we are introduced to Frida Kahlo, a painter from Mexico from the early-to-mid 1900s. The documentary reminds us that she left a large legacy of writings including an illustrated diary and letters, and that all commentary we hear are Frida's own words. We then go back to "1910" to Frida's earliest years.... At this point we are 10 minutes into the movie.

Couple of comments: this movie is a labor of love from editor Carla Guttierez, making her directorial debut. With the help of several animators, Kahlo's life, works and times are presented on a grand and colorful scale. I was generally aware of who Frida Kahlo was, but didn't know many of the personal details that are brought forward in the documentary, including the devastating bus crash that she was involved in (in 1925), which had significant physical consequences the rest of her life. Part of the charm of this documentary is also looking back at what life was like in the 1920's-30's-40's. Check out the footage of when Friday and her husband (the renowned Mexican painter Diego Rivera) visit New York and Detroit in the early 1930's. Not to be picky, but couldn't Guttierez come up with a better film title than the generic "Frida"? That aside, I found this documentary thoroughly enjoyable (and, dare I say, educational) from start to finish.

"Frida" premiered at this year's Sundance film festival, to immediate critical acclaim. The movie is currently rated 905 Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and for good reason. The movie started streaming on Amazon Prime Video 2 weeks ago, and I caught up with it last night. If you have any interest in arts, I'd readily suggest you check this out and draw your own conclusion.

I am a fan of biopics, especially of creative people, such as artists, writers and musicians. In my opinion a fatal flaw of some biopics is the actual inclusion of the subject talking about herself. Seeing that the cast consists of only Frida herself and the fact that I am not a fan of recent films I was fully prepared to give this a rating of 5, but Frida Kahlo is an interesting person and so I felt I had to watch it even if I hated it. But the fact that Frida has been dead for about 70 years and had nothing to do with the production of the film allowed this to be not just good but a fantastic film. A large amount of the material comes from her diaries and paintings, many of them self portraits, and in these Frida was very honest about herself. One feature is that many of her paintings are partially animated. Again, this could have been bad but it was tastefully done so enhanced, rather than spoiled, the film. Fortunately these animations were done before the current AI which would just make her art works into cartoons.