The film director behind the Frida Kahlo cinema re-release on Brighton, feminism and icon-making
If Frida Kahlo were a town, apparently she’d be Brighton.
That’s according to film director Ali Ray, whose newly relaunched film, Frida: Exhibition On Screen, is hitting cinemas on Tuesday 19th May ahead of Tate Modern’s huge new Kahlo exhibition next month. After BOTI was invited to the Brighton launch event at La Choza, She Rebel Radio host Lulu Minns – whose podcast explores women, their genius and what holds them back – sat down with Ray for a podcast interview as part of a collaboration between our two platforms.
The film has some pretty strong Brighton DNA, too. Brighton-based Seventh Art Productions behind Exhibition On Screen – the cinema documentary series bringing major artists and exhibitions to the big screen – produced the film, while Ray herself studied at the University of Sussex and lived in the city for some 15 years as she built her career in filmmaking.
Originally released in 2020, the film never really got the cinema run it deserved thanks to, well, the whole global-pandemic-cinemas-being-shut situation. “You could only go to the cinema and sit sort of five seats apart from people,” Ray says.
Now, with Tate Modern opening Frida: The Making of an Icon in June, the team decided it was the perfect time to bring the film back – this time with newly added material exploring the exhibition and Frida’s transformation into a global icon, including the rise of ‘Fridamania’. The re-release also gives audiences the chance to experience Kahlo’s work properly: huge, immersive and uninterrupted on a cinema screen.
Beyond the flower crowns
And yes, Ray fully sees the Brighton-Frida connection.
“Brighton lets you be who you want to be,” she says. “I always see it as the counterculture capital of the UK.”
That idea of Kahlo as more than just an aesthetic icon is a huge part of the film. Because while Frida’s face is everywhere – tote bags, prints, cushions, probably at least one tea towel in your friend’s flat – Ray (pictured below) became fascinated by how little people actually knew about the art itself.
“I’d say, what do you love about Frida? And then they would talk about her as an icon… but they would never pick her art,” she says.
So she went deep. Nine months deep.
“I spent about nine months researching, speaking to historians, scholars, curators, reading everything I could get my hands on,” she says.
Painting pain
What emerged was a far more layered version of Kahlo than the flattened pop-culture image most of us know. The film explores how Kahlo painted miscarriage, infertility, heartbreak, surgery and physical pain at a time when women were expected to stay quiet about all of it.
“She painted from a place where women were sort of told to hide,” Ray says. “She painted things like miscarriage, heartbreak, illness, surgery, infertility, rage, physical pain – and they’re not polite subjects.”
One of the works that hit Ray hardest was ‘The Broken Column‘, which she encountered alone at night while filming in Mexico City.
“I suddenly had this sort of dark prickles down my back, and I felt like I was being watched,” she says.
The painting, hung on a mirror, shows Kahlo’s body split open, her spine replaced by a shattered column after years of surgeries following the bus accident in her 20s that changed her life. Ray describes it as “an incredible way of communicating pain and a painful body”.
And it’s that emotional honesty – alongside Kahlo’s politics, humour, intellect and total refusal to be reduced to one thing – that feels surprisingly current.
“There are so many layers of Kahlo,” Ray says.
Women artists, finally being seen
Elsewhere in the interview, Ray reflects on the wider history of women artists being remembered for literally anything except the work itself. Kahlo the icon. Lee Miller – the surrealist photographer, war correspondent and Sussex resident whose work is finally getting the recognition it deserves – the muse. Women artists getting softened, sidelined or filtered through the men around them.
Ray (pictured below left, in the centre) ahead of the launch event) points out that even in the Exhibition On Screen catalogue, male artists are usually referred to by surname alone – Monet, Renoir, Caravaggio – while Kahlo becomes simply “Frida”.
“It often happens with female artists… they’re feminised immediately, or they’re set apart,” she says.
Still, there’s something quite lovely about this moment: Kahlo’s work returning to cinemas just as the Tate Modern stages what’s being billed as a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition featuring over 30 of her works, many of which rarely travel.
And Brighton gets to claim a little piece of it, too.
“Anything you need creatively, there’s someone on the doorstep that will step forward and help you out,” Ray says of the city.
As for what’s next, Ray is already working on a new Exhibition On Screen film exploring Pierre-Auguste Renoir, love and relationships in Paris during the Impressionist era, inspired by a current exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay heading to London’s National Gallery in October.
You can listen to the full She Rebel Radio interview here.
See Exhibition On Screen: Frida Kahlo at Duke’s at Komedia on Tues 19th and Wed 27th May; the Depot in Lewes on Tues 19th and Sun 24th May; and at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham on Wed 20th May.
