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.

This documentary is gorgeous. The documentary itself makes you feel as if you are in a beautiful but dark and painful dream - which is wild because that is her artwork, itself. I watched this completely sober and felt like I was in a trance - taken back into history while floating around in Frida's paintings and pictures. I've been a Frida fan for a while, and probably like so many people, I find the darkness of her life intriguing. Especially the pain of her and Diego's relationship. This documentary gives a lot of insight into that relationship, but it also makes it very clear that Frida is more than that relationship which is what I think she would have wanted. Thank you to the creators of this - it's innovative and beautiful. To the woman reading her diary, notes, etc. - seriously amazing job.

According to her bio, Frida Kahlo painted because she must. This was the only way she could express herself. Collected letters, personal writings, and an illustrated diary are all used breathe life into the new biopic, Frida. Her mom was obsessively religious, her father a photographer, a reader and an atheist. Frida was rebellious, drawn to the bad boys. For years she wore men's suits instead of dresses. Laughed when her classmates strapped fireworks to a dog and let him run around their school.

She and her first love, Alejandro, were involved in a terrible traffic accident in Mexico, when she was quite young. They thought Frida would not survive. Though she did not succumb to her injuries, she endured months of casts and terrible pain every day, though this never stopped her from creating iconic self-portraits throughout her life.

Using animation to bring movement to her artwork, plus adding splashes of color to newsreels and archival footage, Frida's production team recreates the artist's life and times in sound and visuals. Kahlo was a self-described communist. She, and other Mexican artists of the time, such as muralist Diego Rivera, used their talents to emphasize the spirit of the revolution. She and Rivera began an intimate relationship, eventually marrying. Kahlo's own style evolved to become more like Rivera's.

What's fascinating here is that in Frida, Kahlo comes across in real life as joyous, and not the dour woman we expect her to be, based on her self-portraits. Understanding that she was in constant pain does help one to comprehend the reason her portraits seem to project stern aloofness. In her writings, she also expresses her disgust at the conditions of the workers in America in the early 20th century, the extreme divisions between rich and poor.

Kahlo has multiple affairs with scholars and artists of the time, including Leon Trotsky and Georgia O'Keefe. Rivera, too, has multiple affairs including one with Frida's own sister. Eventually the couple divorce.

Kahlo then becomes more prolific, pushing forward with her take on artistic surrealism, though she had no idea at the time that she was part of that movement. Then, just as quickly, the whole NY art scene sickens her, pushing her in her creative journey. Like many artists, she finds some happiness but also experiences deep depression.

I'm honestly unsure what type of audience will appreciate the film. I feel that it would play tremendously well if it were accompanied by an exhibition of her work, perhaps running at a venue like the Dali Museum in St. Pete.

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.

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.