Becoming Frida Kahlo

Let me tell you about a little girl born in Mexico.

She would grow up to be one of the most famous artists

in the world.

We all recognise her face, and that look.

But who was she really?

And why is she more loved now than ever before?

This daughter of the revolution lived no ordinary life,

and hers is no easy tale to tell.

Frida Kahlo was a rule-breaker.

The way she broke taboos, the way she broke the norm

was completely revolutionary and transgressive.

She doesn't respect things that should be respected,

like birth, blood, miscarriages.

She made no concessions about her art.

She was strong and ambitious and answered to no-one.

But she was also driven and tormented by love.

She said, "I love Diego more than I love my own life."

She would always come back to Diego Rivera, like an obsession.

An obsession that was painful.

So why do we still idolise her?

This mixed-up mess of contradictions.

And why can't we take our eyes off her?

What people see in her is all that power of rebellion,

irreverence.

For people who are queer, for people who are brown,

for people who are creative in different ways.

She teaches us about identity.

Art was her superpower.

In the end, I don't need her perfect.

She was genius.

BELL RINGS

THUNDER RUMBLES

Frida Kahlo was born under the rain.

July is a month of rain in Mexico.

And I have a theory

people that are born in the rainy season are different.

SHE SPEAKS SPANISH

What doesn't kill you make you stronger.

At the age of six, I had polio and my leg began to grow thin.

At first, I assumed that the children's taunts

wouldn't affect me, but later, they really did, and each time worse.

As she grew up,

she needed to be different, and needed to be noticed.

She was a rule-breaker!

She drank too much.

She smoked too much.

She used foul language.

And so what she's saying is,

"Yes. I am something else.

"What am I?"

Frida Kahlo was a daughter of the Mexican Revolution.

Mexico's revolution is really the first major social revolution

in the 20th century.

It was the first opportunity a country had taken to say,

"We want to change things."

"We're going to improve society."

Frida Kahlo claimed that 1910 was her date of birth,

even though she was born in 1907.

She wanted to align her date of birth

with the birth of this new Mexico.

She was making a statement about her devotion to all the layers

of Mexican culture.

Frida came from the village of Coyoacan,

in the middle of nowhere.

Surrounded by rivers, trees,

animals, flowers, the church.

There isn't really much going on.

So the experience of going to the National Preparatory School

in Mexico City changed her life.

In those days, it was very few women who started the preparatory.

You have to bear in mind that from the generation of 2,000,

there were only 35 women.

Students from very different backgrounds

would join in a single place and learned all together.

This is a generation of change.

Frida becomes part of this.

The students were very much involved into politics.

The Communist Party was very powerful at that time in Mexico.

And they had meetings and they had marches.

And Frida joined the young section of the Communist Party.

Dear Mama,

today I will stay at school because Diego Rivera

will deliver a lecture.

I believe it's about Russia.

And I would like to learn some about Russia.

If you would like to come, let me know at noon.

Send me five cents for an ice-cream cone

and five cents for quesadillas?

Your daughter, Frida.

If you were a student in the National Preparatory School

such as Frida was, there is no way you didn't know who was Diego Rivera

and what he was painting.

For the very young Frida Kahlo,

seeing Rivera talk,

that must have been fascinating.

Mexican muralist -

but a movement that completely changed the idea of art

in the world.

And my grandfather, Diego, promote himself as he being the inventor.

And he was the leading head.

The Ministry of Education implements the idea to produce public art

in public buildings.

We need to let the people, the common people, know,

through public walls, what has happened,

and what are we searching for?

In the walls, viewers could see a contemporary history.

You didn't need to read, but you could see the wall.

You could follow these stories.

Who was who.

What kinds of battles took place.

If you put yourself in front of one of these murals,

your life has been changed.

BELL RINGS

I fell in with a group called Los Cachuchas.

They were not communists, but liberals.

They were lazy and never studied.

They were called the Cachuchas.

According to their caps were cachuchas.

I've never heard of that word for cap, but...

She was very mischievous and so were they.

I was loafing around in class.

I was with the boys everywhere they went.

Instead of going to my classes, I went to theirs.

I barely passed classes, or I cheated to get good grades.

They were terrible, all of them terrible and very bad students,

which is something very, very incredible.

Because they were so bright. So bright.

The Cachuchas had a lot of admiration for

Alejandro Gomez Arias.

Gomez Arias was the speaker in school.

He always participated in all the meetings and all the trouble.

I fell in love with Gomez Arias and he with me.

He was handsome.

He was pretty good-looking.

I mean, when I saw him, he was an old man, but...

But I've seen photographs of him when he was younger.

And he was very gentle.

They were an interesting pair that way

because she's kind of fierce and he was not fierce at all.

When Gomez Arias took me home,

he would kiss me and recite verses to me.

I was in love with Gomez Arias, but I was very flirtatious.

He would become horribly jealous.

I wanted him to ravish me.

But he preferred to tell me nice things, to kiss me and hug me.

He had this passion for her and she had a passion for him.

He loved the vitality in Frida.

She was beautiful.

I think she was a beautiful girl.

So... And she was more fun than most people.

Lots of fun.

It was 16 of September, one day after the grito,

which is a very big festivity in Mexico

for the independence of Mexico.

In those days, there was sort of a fair going around the Zocalo,

in the main plaza.

Frido went to the fair with Alejandro Gomez Arias,

and there were stands with candies and with balloons

and with little toys.

And Frida was very fond of the little toys.

She bought a small umbrella, this kind of Chinese umbrella

that are used to decorate beverages.

And she was fascinated with that.

They were coming home from Mexico City on a bus, and the buses

at that point were pretty rickety.

They were wooden.

They were going to get on one bus, but she'd lost some toy,

therefore they got on the next bus.

She has this quote where she says,

"Most of my friends grow up slowly. I grew up in an instant."

She was about to be 20.

I was sitting next to Frida.

The electric train with two cars

approached the bus slowly.

It hit the bus in the middle.

Slowly, the train pushed it.

The bus got ploughed into by a trolley car.

It was almost as though it was intentional.

I mean, he just kept coming and kept coming.

The bus bent more and more. For a time,

it did not break, but then it burst into 1,000 pieces.

It ran over many people.

There were dead people and people screaming.

Naturally, the first thing that I did was to look for Frida.

I picked her up and then I noticed with horror

Frida had a piece of iron in her body.

QUIET BEEPING

Frida's condition was so grave that the doctors did not think

they could save her.

They thought she would die on the operating table.

There was a metal handrail that pierced Frida Kahlo's body.

Everything - she was broken in many different parts.

In this hospital,

death is dancing around my bed at night.

I lost my virginity, a kidney was bruised, I couldn't urinate.

But the thing I complained about the most was my backbone.

I do not fear death.

It's pain I can't stand.

It's not that Frida Kahlo starts to paint from zero.

She liked to draw.