“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida

Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). So how does a filmmaker go about capturing and confining such an ethereal figure to the screen? If you’re the multi-award-winning editor Carla Gutiérrez (Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s RBG and Julia) you compile and compose as much Frida-generated material as seemingly possible: letters, essays, her personal diary (and sketches and paintings from that diary); and also nearly 50 original paintings and sketches (and around half a dozen Rivera murals). Then you add in first-person accounts from Kahlo’s colleagues and intimates (and very intimate intimates) and arresting archival photos. Finally, you complete your topnotch, mostly Latinx team with Mexican animators and a lyrical narrator to guide us through this wonderland that was the fiery legend’s real magical world.

Just prior to the Sundance premiere of Frida (January 18th in the US Documentary Competition) Filmmaker reached out to the veteran editor to learn all about her own artistic journey to this auspicious, all-archival directorial debut. (Produced by Imagine Documentaries and TIME Studios, in association with Storyville Films, Frida also hits Prime Video on March 15th.) To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.