‘Frida’ Director Carla Gutierrez Wanted Audience To Feel Kahlo’s Emotions – Contenders Documentary

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Frida is not just a documentary about the art and life of Frida Kahlo. Director Carla Gutierrez wanted to use the tools of the format to capture Kahlo’s emotions. Those tools included narration, archival material, score and the creative touch of animating Kahlo’s paintings.

“We wanted to make sure that the audience in a way kind of physically or literally dove into Frida’s heart and into her pool of emotions and was able to like swim in there with her,” Gutierrez said during a conversation for Deadline’s awards-season event Contenders Documentary. “Bringing her art into this filmic space, cinematic space, was really key to really hearing in a way her heart beat and her emotions go through her veins.”

Gutierrez credits her animation department in Mexico City on their collaboration. As well, Katia Maguire led the production team to gather archival material in Mexico, including about the 1925 cable car accident Kahlo survived, to show viewers Mexico as the artist lived it.

“You’re seeing her eyes looking at us in her paintings,” Gutierrez said. “We wanted the audience to also look at her universe through her eyes. A lot of those accidents, unfortunately, happened in Mexico City. So we found some really gruesome images of what happened after those accidents.”

Kahlo speaks in the film too, via the voice of Fernanda Echevarria, in Spanish with English subtitles. The performance captures Kahlo’s personality in her native language.

“You can hear Frida swearing at people and making fun of people,” Gutierrez said. “You’re still hearing her original words, and I think that that carries so much emotional meaning, even if you need the subtitles to really understand what she’s saying.”

Gutierrez said Kahlo was politically active and popular socially. Her paintings were where Kahlo expressed vulnerability, often as her own subject.

“She painted herself and her heartaches, her daily questioning of her own feelings,” Gutierrez said. “For a lot of women, it’s really hard to sometimes talk about ourselves and even admit that what’s happening internally for us is also important to talk about and it’s also important to express.”

That goes for the painting that initially turned Gutierrez on to Kahlo’s work decades ago. The Peruvian filmmaker related to Kahlo’s complicated feelings about America.

“It’s her standing between the United States and Mexico,” Gutierrez said. “She didn’t always feel welcome here and was missing her country a lot. And that’s exactly how I felt as a new immigrant. I was just learning how to speak English, but it was that moment of seeing my own self and my own emotions and my own most intimate feelings being reflected on a painting that I think makes art so powerful to people.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.

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