Frida Kahlo Documentary Debuts at Sundance

One of the great tragedies of Frida Kahlo’s life is the fact that, for all her brilliance as an artist, she was often defined by the people whose orbits she shared. In the eyes of many, her primary role in history was being Diego Rivera’s wife, a source of inspiration and creative friction that propelled him to greatness as he painted his legendary murals. Her infamous affair with Leon Trotsky only added to the mystique of her image as a muse for male revolutionaries. It’s a wildly simplistic understanding of her life, of course, as Kahlo’s paintings are every bit as historically significant as Rivera’s. From her early embrace of Mexican folk art and Surrealist imagery (a label she came to vehemently reject, though much of her work remained within its parameters) to her unflinching depictions of female anatomy and malaise, Kahlo is a giant of the 20th-century art world.

With the global cultural intelligentsia spending much of the past decade revising canons to ensure that underrepresented artists receive the status and accolades in death that often eluded them in life, the task of revisiting Kahlo’s life story loomed large. Carla Gutierrez’s “Frida” makes a formidable effort to do just that, crafting a narrative that squares Kahlo’s unimpeachable brilliance with the unavoidable fact that she spent much of her short and tragic life as a passive participant in other people’s stories. The documentary is a valiant effort that offers a much better…