Crossing boundaries: Carla Gutiérrez delves into the complicated life of 'Frida'

Mar. 23—Carla Gutiérrez wanted to make a big splash when it came to her directorial debut.

As an editor, she worked on "RBG" and "La corona."

Gutiérrez knew she wanted to delve into the life of Frida Kahlo and give context as to why the artist — and her art — remains as powerful as ever.

"One painting brought me to her. I was a new immigrant in the states and college as a math major. I was also doing studio art classes. It was kind of like an interesting combination. But the way that I used to procrastinate in college was to get lost in the library and look at artwork. That's how I discovered the first painting that drew me to her," Gutiérrez says. "It was called 'The Borderline,' which was Frida standing on a pedestal but wearing a pink dress. She was between the United States and Mexico. And I immediately connected to that painting. I just saw myself in that painting, a lot of my feelings at the time."

"Frida" covers more than 40 years of Kahlo's life.

The filmmakers received unrestricted access .

Gutiérrez and her formidable team of artisans, most of whom are women, gathered together to craft a singular cinematic experience over the course of two years.

"Frida" is streaming on Prime Video.

Globally-revered as one of Mexico's greatest artists, Kahlo's searing collection of self-portraits offered the world an uncompromising and extraordinary window into her mental and emotional state. Balancing personal pain with exquisite passion, she dared to lay bare critical moments in her life, always in blazing color.

Moreover, her pride in Latinidad, her Indigenous roots and, especially, womanhood forged a legacy based on complex life experiences, and a universal and timeless narrative resulting in nearly 200 paintings, sketches and drawings.

Today, her name is synonymous with gender and cultural pride and female empowerment.

Yet, in her time, she faced extraordinary barriers against her forward-thinking ideologies and commentaries, displaying her raw, emotional self with a canon of art that often rendered leading political and art world figures in her time speechless and uncomfortable. Hers was a legacy deemed as being a ribbon wrapped around a bomb with an explosive collection of work whose concussive effects would ultimately impact future generations decades after her passing in 1954 at the age of 47.

Gutiérrez says as an editor, she's been at the center of the creative process.

"I don't see the move to directing as a step-up. I think that, in a way, with this film, the story was telling me that I needed to do it for a lot of reasons," Gutiérrez says. "I was unsure if other people were thinking about doing this story the way I wanted to, and I felt strongly that it needed to come out this way. I wanted to offer Frida's voice in a very honest, intimate and raw way. And that requires an incredible amount of research and a huge amount of balls, in a way. You're taking the voice and playing with the voice of somebody many people feel close to and feel a kind of ownership with. But I also felt that I had a connection to a cultural reality shared with her. I'm not from Mexico, but I'm from Peru. I grew up in Peru. I grew up in that Catholic world. I grew up in the type of machista culture that she grew up with, maybe at a different time. I grew up understanding the dirtiness of magical realism, not the way that Hollywood understands it, but how dirty and raw and painful it can be."