We hear that her boyfriend at the time, Alejandro Gómez Arias, has abandoned her, perhaps due to the seriousness of her injuries. There is one particularly memorable moment when, in her convalescence after the bus accident, she turns to painting from her bed, aided by her mother, who built her an adapted easel. It also draws heavily on Kahlo’s own words and work. Obviously there is little footage of either Kahlo or Rivera, so instead this documentary pieces together its thesis using interviews, photographs, newspapers – their wedding was front-page news – and the occasional bit of scene-setting from modern-day Mexico City, though this is used sparingly. ![]() Photograph: Victor Reyes/BBC/Rogan Productions Irreverent … Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, wedding portrait, 21 August 1929. The information they provide is out there already – Rivera was a huge celebrity in Mexico, as famous as Picasso in his time (“ possibly Picasso was more famous”, says one contributor) – yet it gives it a personal and comprehensive feel. Kahlo’s great-niece Cristina Kahlo, now a photographer, talks about the artist’s husband and great love, the artist Diego Rivera, as does Rivera’s grandson. There are interviews with biographers, art historians, and, fascinatingly, family members. Her work is so familiar (and so astonishingly valuable – her 1949 painting Diego y yo sold for almost $35m in 2021) that it seems a mammoth task to shine a new light on it, and yet this documentary manages to do so. This opening episode, The Making and Breaking, squashes a great deal of information and insight about Kahlo’s early life into an hour, and sets up a gripping and convincing portrait of the great artist that she would become. Not so with Becoming Frida Kahlo, the first of a three-part series on the legendary Mexican painter, which canters along at a celebratory pace. T oo often, documentaries about art and artists can lean towards the pretentious and stodgy.
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