Frida Kahlo He used his experiences to create his art. In that spirit, Kahlo’s personal writings serve to tell the story of his life in a new way. documentary film.
Filmmaker Carla Gutirrez combines first-person narration with archival images and interpretive animation of Kahlo’s work in the documentary Frida, currently available on Prime Video in the United States and which will premiere in theaters in Mexico on May 9.
Gutirrez, who was born in Peru and moved to the United States as a teenager, first connected with Kahlo’s paintings in college.
“I was a new immigrant and there was one specific painting that really introduced me to her voice in which she appears as an artist on the border between the United States and Mexico,” Gutirrez recalled. I saw my experience of that moment really reflected in the painting. Then it became part of my life.
Gutirrez was an editor and was happy with that path in film. She worked on significant projects such as RBG and Julia, which allowed her to be intimately involved creatively. But when a director friend whispered Kahlo’s name to her, she returned to her college books. Within a few hours she was already making plans to direct.
“I feel like this story really told me that I needed to step up and direct it,” he said. I realized that she could tell a lot of her own story and I felt like it hadn’t been done yet. I hope it is a new way to enter her world, her mind and her heart and really understand art in a more intimate and raw way.
Kahlo did not give many interviews during her lifetime, Gutirrez said, but she wrote very intimate and personal letters. The filmmaker was surprised by her sense of humor, her sarcasm and her irony, as well as how explicit she was about her opinions.
It’s like messy confidence and messy feminism, in a way, she said.
The film crew had to search museums in different parts of the world to find the letters they would compile to create a complete picture of Kahlo, including the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington ( where the correspondence with her mother was located) and the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca, where they found her letters to her doctor on all kinds of topics, from her complex marriage to her spontaneous abortion.
One of the biggest creative decisions was to animate Kahlo’s art, which has proven a bit divisive since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Some love it, others are not convinced. But it was part of the vision of the film from its early stages. The hope, Gutirrez said, was to transport the audience from the real world to Kahlo’s inner world.
“I always thought about his heart and his veins, moving from his hands to the canvas,” he said. We wanted to be very respectful of the paintings, but at the same time introduce lyrical animation so that it seemed like we were diving into her real feelings and her heart.
Gutirrez is especially proud that her collaborators are mostly Latino and bilingual. The composer Victor Hernndez Stumpfhauser is Mexican. The animation team is made up of Mexican artists and includes art director Renata Galindo.
Injecting this cultural understanding of the country into the film is fantastic, Gutirrez said.
FUENTE: AP
