Peruvian Carla Gutiérrez’s directorial debut comprises a raw and magical journey into the life of iconic artist Frida Kahlo, told through her own words from diaries, letters, essays, and interviews. The film, which premiered at Sundance 2024, is vividly brought to life via lyrical animation inspired by Karla’s artworks.
Gutiérrez speaks with Brazilian Academy Award-nominated docmaker Petra Costa, kicking off with why she embarked on a film about Kahlo in the first place.
“I think I carry this story with me. For decades, my connection to Frida has been on a personal level,” she says. “Some of us really look at art or film, and we find ourselves reflected in that art, and we find ourselves [in] a refuge… a place where we feel taken care of and warm. That’s how I always felt with her paintings. I discovered her when I was a young, young woman, so I knew of her as she was really. Her art has always been really important for me, and it’s been a place where I really kind of discovered my own feelings; and I was able to have even a conversation with myself by just looking at her paintings.”
“And then after having a long career as an editor, just the idea came to me… I knew so much about her that I knew that she had left a rich testimony of her life, not by doing interviews, but really by having a diary where she really kind of let loose a lot of poetry…but also a lot of letters,” Gutiérrez continues. “I had been obsessed with her early on, so I pretty much really knew about her life very closely. “And when I thought about it, and I went back to those books that I had read when I was a young woman, I really had a sense of her voice. And I understood that maybe there was a way of telling her story, but having her really tell us what she lived through and how she felt and how she saw the world. And there were enough fragments of her writings where I thought, ‘oh, she could tell some of her story.’”
“And that revelation was, for me, very special because I asked myself, has this story been told like this before? And then when I realized no, I’ve seen all the films about Frida and it hasn’t been through her own voice and through her own words, I was like, maybe I should do it because this is the film that I really want to watch of her, and maybe I should become a director to be able to do it and do it now.”
Click on the link above to watch and listen to the whole conversation between Carla Gutiérrez and Petra Costa.
