News

The Sundance Film Festival remains the largest independent film festival in the United States, and as was the case in both 2023 and 2024, the 2025 edition will be in a hybrid format, with screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City, Ut, along with limited selections available online for viewers across the United States. This provides cinephiles ample opportunity to check out some of the most exciting indie cinema that will be coming your way this year.

FandomWire is delighted to again be covering the Sundance Film Festival, but this year, for the first time in person in Park City, Utah! We will be reviewing many of the films we see on the ground, but for now, we wanted to let you know about some of the films we have gotten the opportunity to see early and you won’t want to miss.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono appear in One to One: John & Yoko...

Frida is not just a documentary about the art and life of Frida Kahlo. Director Carla Gutierrez wanted to use the tools of the format to capture Kahlo’s emotions. Those tools included narration, archival material, score and the creative touch of animating Kahlo’s paintings.

“We wanted to make sure that the audience in a way kind of physically or literally dove into Frida’s heart and into her pool of emotions and was able to like swim in there with her,” Gutierrez said during a conversation for Deadline’s awards-season event Contenders Documentary. “Bringing her art into this filmic space, cinematic space, was really key to really hearing in a way her heart beat and her emotions go through her veins.”

Gutierrez credits her animation department in Mexico City on their collaboration. As well, Katia Maguire led the production team to gather archival material in Mexico, including about...

There are no known recordings of Frida Kahlo’s voice. But the iconic painter, who died in 1954, tells her own story in director Carla Gutiérrez’s documentary “Frida,” which is guided by her words (spoken by actress Fernanda Echevarría) from interviews, essays and diaries.

Acclaimed for its semi-animated visual strategy, the film (available on Amazon Prime) is also a sensory aural experience, propelled by a passionate, rhapsodic score by Victor Hernández Stumpfhauser. The Burbank-based, Mexican-born conductor and songwriter’s credits include features, shorts and three compositions on the “Birdman” soundtrack.

For the documentary, he said, “I thought of the music as Frida’s inner voice, sort of like her spirit. We think of Frida as very strong, loud, rebellious, which is an important part of her, but I wanted the music to also relate to the vulnerable, intimate side of her personality. It’s an aspect of Frida we don...

Expanding its lineup for Cannes this year, top Spanish indie studio Filmax has snagged international rights to feature “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” by Laura Casabé, a notable figure in genre filmmaking who won the best director prize at Sitges in 2019 for “Los que vuelven” (aka “The Returned”).

The film has just been announced as one of highest-profile of five titles at a Ventana Sur Goes to Cannes showcase at this year’s Marché du Film.

It’s penned by Benjamin Naishtat, a major Argentine writer-director in his own right, and draws inspiration from two gripping short stories by genre writer Mariana Enríquez (“El Carrito” and “La Virgen De La Tosquera”).

Combining folklore, coming-of-age and social horror elements, the plot centers on Natalia, a recent high school graduate who finds herself deeply infatuated with Diego, a close childhood friend. However, their bond is tested when Silvia, older and worldlier,...

Not to be confused with the 2002 narrative film by director Julie Taymor, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera of the same name, the new documentary Frida is an honest and lovingly constructed film that brings to the forefront the far-reaching influence of Kahlo and her work, further solidifying her status as an artist of singular importance.

The film is narrated by Fernanda Echevarría, performing as Frida Kahlo reading from her diary, letters, essays, and various printed interviews. This approach, when presented alongside the vivid animations of Kahlo’s work breathes an extraordinary amount of life into an already extraordinary life. The story unfolds as both a raw and methodical journey throughout Kahlo’s life that never strays from the central through line of her search for beauty through art.

Carla Gutierrez makes an impressive directorial debut with Frida after amassing an astonishingly impressive resume of credits as an editor.

Frida explores the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, using both her art and her writings to reflect her complex life. Narratives from her diary entries and letters provide insight into how her life influenced her art. The documentary combines real-world visuals with Kahlo's paintings to capture the essence of her intertwined life and art.

Artist Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognizable Mexican painters in history. Known for the portraits and self-portraits she painted throughout her life, she utilized surrealism to create art that was both historical and autobiographical. In addition to her paintings, she wrote extensively about her life in diary entries, letters, and essays, crafting a much larger view of who she was as a person. All her work intersects in Frida, a 2024 documentary directed by Carla Gutiérrez about her life told through the words and images she created.

8/10

Frida is a documentary film by...

At the world premiere of Frida during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, audiences couldn’t stop talking about director Carla Gutierrez’s choice to animate Frida Kahlo’s paintings throughout the documentary about the artist — and not always in a good way.

“We knew that it was a bold decision,” Gutierrez told IndieWire of the conversation that sprang up around the film. “Obviously, when you’re putting out a film and you’re getting the first reactions, you take them really intensely, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, Ok.’ But we had so many conversations about what we meant and what we wanted to do with animation, that a lot of the things that people brought up or questioned were actually questions that we posed ourselves through the process.”

Though controversial — IndieWire’s Christian Zilko wrote, “Rather than show [Kahlo’s] actual paintings, the film relies on animated versions of them...

Voiceovers of Frida Kahlo’s writing give us unprecedented insight into her life as she dealt with chronic pain, divorce, infidelity, miscarriage and commercial success

“I paint because I need to.” The revelation of this new documentary about Frida Kahlo is the white-hot brilliance of her writing. On the voiceover, Kahlo tells her story in her own words, stitched together from letters, diaries and interviews (brought to life by Mexican stage actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero). The end result has a raw, thrilling intimacy.

Kahlo was rebellious by nature. As a little girl she tugged on the priest’s cassock: “Was the virgin Mary really a virgin?” At college, on course to become a doctor, she wore men’s suits; in old photos, she looks like a beautiful boy. Then came the life-changing accident that nearly killed her. Aged 18, Kahlo was travelling on a bus that collided with a tram.

The image of Frida Kahlo, the prominent Mexican painter of the early 20 century, is one of the most replicated and commercialized of any artist in the history of the world. From T-shirts to houseware, merchandise of all sorts emblazoned with her face has turned Kahlo into a kitschy, mainstream, decontextualized emblem for Mexican identity. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of her works are self-portraits. Onscreen, the Salma Hayek-starring Hollywood biopic from director Julie Taymor and Paul Leduc’s 1983’s Mexican-production “Frida Still Life” attempted to decipher the tehuana-clad iconoclast via scripted portrayals.

With all that cultural and media baggage on her shoulders, Carla Gutiérrez dares to construct a documentary using a unique approach to such an imposing subject. An editor taking on directorial duties for the first time, Gutierrez is no stranger to assembling nonfiction portraits of major figures, having cut titles like “Rgb” and “Chavela”. Told mostly in Spanish,...

My guess is that Frida Kahlo would have loathed “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” the kind of touring exhibit that professes to honor the canvas while bathing it in digital-tech kitsch. And, having seen Carla Gutiérrez’s riveting documentary Frida, I’m certain the artist would have announced her disdain with a laugh and a healthy dose of juicy invective. If you want to immerse yourself in Frida Kahlo, here is the real thing.

Taking the helm for the first time, editor Gutiérrez (Rbg, Julia) pushes past the dime-a-dozen “icon” label to face the artist on her own terms, drawing upon Kahlo’s illustrated diaries and letters. The film’s archival riches also include an extraordinary selection of photographs and footage, and the transcripts of interviews with people close to Kahlo by biographer Hayden Herrera, whose 1983 book was the basis of the Julie Taymor biopic starring Salma Hayek.

Whatever that 2002 movie’s strengths and weaknesses,...