The early 1940s self-portraits of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo that show monkeys wrapped around her neck may seem playful on the surface. In reality, Kahlo painted them during a suffocating period of her life when she was tangled in a messy divorce and desperate for work.
Frida, a new documentary produced by TIME Studios out in select theaters on March 1, explores how Kahlo endured several personal tragedies and fueled her experience into her art, creating the vibrant surrealist paintings and self-portraits that made her an iconic artist.
The film, which streams on Amazon Prime on March 14, brings Kahlo’s paintings to life through animation, archival footage, and snippets from the artist’s personal writings, billing itself as the first documentary to be told entirely through her own words as well as those of her intimates. Director Carla Gutierrez’s team scoured museums for Kahlo’s letters and used excerpts from the artist’s published diary, voiced by Fernanda Echevarría Del Rivero, in the film, which allows her sharp tongue to be put on full display. In her writings, she works through her feelings on men, the economics of art, the nature of independence, and the world. She lobs a critique at the U.S.: “Everything is about appearances but deep down it’s a pile of sh-t.”
While Kahlo’s story has been covered in biographies and films, Frida stands out for its innovative use of animation that makes her iconic paintings come alive.
Frida and self-portraits
Kahlo started painting after fracturing her pelvis in a bus crash when she was a teenager. “It wasn’t violent but silent. Slow,” she reflects in the film in voiceover. “The handrail went through me like a sword through a bull.”
The crash altered everything. Kahlo spent months in a body cast—“bored as hell,” as she once put it—and her mother devised a makeshift easel that allowed her to paint in bed. She even hung a mirror over her daughter’s head so she could paint self…
