New footage of Frida Kahlo

Filmmaker Amy Strechler uncovered a vast collection of photographs of Kahlo, as well as rare video collections of friends, students and experts in her era, which has allowed Strechler to explore a new side of the famed painter.

The film titled The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo chronologically details her life in relation to her historical surroundings and the cultural influences which inspired her to create the works she did, and defined who she was in the first 20 years of her life.

She became an international sensation in modern art and radical politics and was torn between the political, artistic and social extremes of her environment at the time.

The film is an intimate biography of a woman who gracefully balanced a private life of illness and pain against a public persona that was flamboyant, irreverent and world renowned.

It documents the career of the first modern Mexican painter to hang in the Louvre, and looks at her ambiguous relationship with her contemporaries and avant-garde art, from Cubism to Surrealism to the Mexican Mural Movement.

The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo will be screened at the Ditsong Museum of Military History in Saxonwold on 29 March.

Details: 011 486 3648; majestic@telkomsa.net