How ‘Frida’ director Carla Gutierrez rediscovered material about the iconic Mexican artist

“Frida” is a new documentary film from director Carla Gutierrez in which the narration is primarily taken directly from the letters, interviews and diaries of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

“So I feel like the story for me, it started back then,” says Gutierrez, who also co-edits the film, a role she’s previously done on such documentaries as “RBG” about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and “Julia,” about chef Julia Child. “When I came back to her story at 47 years old, I was actually the same age when I started looking into her story. Which was kind of shocking to me.”“I spent a couple of decades or more, really connecting to some of her paintings,” she says.

“So that’s how it started, with this idea that we could offer an intimacy into her life that had maybe not been shown on film,” Gutierrez continues. “Like really, truly focusing on her words and her voice as much as we could. “The research that went into collecting all of her writings was really intense,” she says. “We not only collected all her writings, but we also did a lot of research on contextual material. We tried to gather every interview from people that knew her that we could find. And the research took us into some interesting places.”

“There was a couple called the Crommies, who are in San Francisco, who made a film about Frida,” Gutierrez says of the 1966 short documentary “The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo as Told to Karen and David Crommie.” “They did a lot of interviews with people, like with the nurse that took care of Frida in the last years of her life.

That unfiltered voice, at different times funny, poignant or salty, adds greatly to the narration of Kahlo’s words delivered in the Spanish or English in which they were written. “It was a bold decision,” Gutierrez says. “It could be seen as a controversial decision to touch Frida’s art. But it was a decision I made at the very beginning because I knew that we were working in this cinematic universe.

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