‘Frida’ Documentary On Mexican Artist Based On Unprecedented Research

For their Oscar-contending documentary Frida, director Carla Gutiérrez, producer Katia Maguire and team conducted extraordinarily detailed research into artist Frida Kahlo, a quest that extended from Mexico City to an attic in Cape Cod, Mass.

The east coast venture took them to the doorstep of historian Hayden Herrera, author of the definitive study Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. Herera thought the Smithsonian Institution had already picked up all her materials for the book, but it turned out that wasn’t entirely true. Up the ladder the filmmakers climbed.

“In the very back corner of the attic, we found a box that said ‘Frida’ on it,” Gutiérrez recalls. It contained Herrera’s original research, transcripts of interviews she had conducted, Kahlo’s personal correspondence and “really magical things like that…. [Herrera] was the first person that was able to see the letters that Frida sent to her first boyfriend — many, many letters that she sent as a teenager. There’s a lot of dramatic teenage stuff in it… I got to see those letters from Frida’s boyfriend. She told us the story of meeting him, that she was surprised he was carrying all those letters.”

Herrera’s assistance came not only with her treasure trove of materials, but a tip on where to look next.

“She said that a big inspiration or reference for her book were these audio recordings that David and Karen Crommie had made for their film about Frida Kahlo,” Maguire explains. “It was a short film that really reintroduced Frida Kahlo to mostly women and the feminist movement in the United States. That’s really when she started gaining momentum as this feminist icon. Hayden told us she had listened to the taped interviews the Crommies had conducted [with Frida’s contemporaries] for their film. And, so, we just set out to find them.”

That leg of the expedition took them to San Francisco, where the Crommies, now in their 90s, live.

“They were really welcoming,” Maguire recalls. “They had been approached by different academics and people who study Frida over the years. But no one had ever asked them if they had the original tapes. And so they told us, ‘Yeah, we still have ’em, but they’re in these old formats. I’m not sure if you’re going to have the equipment to be able to listen to them.’ And we were like, ‘We can take care of that.’ Because they were these primary source interviews, they really helped us understand the context that Frida was living in and understand her in a fuller and richer way.”

In the Coyoacán area of Mexico City stands the Frida Kahlo Museum, also known as La Casa Azul for its striking blue exterior. It’s a repository of some of the painter’s cuadros, as well as work by her husband, the famed muralist Diego Rivera.

“Most of the archival that you find in the museum is a huge quantity of photographs that Frida collected,” Gutiérrez notes. “We were able to get digital copies of all of the archives… They don’t allow anybody to actually go into the archives anymore because sadly, a long time ago — we learned this during the process — there were a couple of small thieves… and a couple of little things were taken from the archives. So, they’re really, really careful with that stuff.”

Frida, from Amazon MGM Studios, explores the great passions Frida experienced in her life, and the equally great pain – some physical, some emotional. In 1925, at the age of 18, she was nearly killed when a bus she was riding in was rammed by a trolley car, causing terrible injury that certainly shortened her life. During her long convalescence, her mother set up an easel for Frida to use as she lay in bed; were it not for that act, she might never have become an artist.

The documentary takes viewers inside Kahlo’s vibrant canvases, using animation to bring them alive in ways never depicted before. There, too, rigorous research was key.

“Our animators actually went to a couple of museums in Mexico City just to look at the actual paintings to make sure we were getting the right color for the film,” Gutiérrez says. Adds Maguire, “That’s just how detail-oriented our animation team was, is that they went, and they looked with their own two eyes.”

The filmmakers assembled an unprecedented data base of Kahlo’s writings, collected from sources around the globe. Some missives evoked one of the most difficult times in the artist’s life, when she hoped to have a baby with Rivera, despite the injury to her abdomen suffered in the 1925 bus accident.

“That’s what really stayed with me, especially, were two letters that she sent to her doctor when she got pregnant, and she was really afraid of her body not being able to carry the pregnancy to term,” Gutiérrez notes. “She was considering abortion, which at that time was possible in Mexico, but not in the United States. I had read fragments of those letters in books, but being able to read the entire thing, you could really get a feeling for her fragility at the time and the questions that she was asking herself and the fear that she had. Those were the magical moments when we had direct interactions with her full writings that we tried to capture in the film.”

It took a team effort to find materials to create the finished film:

>Adrián Gutiérrez – co-producer & archival producer. “Spearheaded research at Mexican archives at institutions, built photo and footage database,” the filmmakers note.

>Gabriel Rivera – archival producer. “Main researcher at U.S. and international based archives and institutions.”

>Laura Pilloni – senior associate producer. “Oversaw all databases, built database for Frida’s writings, organized all writings thematically.”

>Paula Ospina – assistant editor. “Organized all photos and conducted additional internet research for photos.”

Frida premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for U.S. Documentary. It is nominated for the Truer Than Fiction Award at the upcoming Film Independent Spirit Awards, and nominated for five awards, including Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature Film, at next month’s Cinema Eye Honors.

All the recognition results from that intensive investigation into Frida Kahlo’s life and work.

“I think that’s the beauty of really doing the homework, to do such deep research, is that creative experimentation [it allows],” observes Gutiérrez. “Being able to make decisions creatively later on [in edit], to really lean into some emotional aspects, that really comes from deep understanding and doing a lot of reading, really collecting everything that we could collect with the visuals.”