What more is there to say about Frida Kahlo – artist, revolutionary, political activist, global icon – that we don’t already know? Turns out, quite a bit. These days you’d struggle to find someone who’d never heard of her, but like many figures who attain iconic status in pop culture, and wind up on keyrings and tote bags, a great deal of who she was remains misunderstood.

Exhibition On Screen: Frida Kahlo, from director Ali Ray, attempts to deconstruct the Frida we think we know. Made as a tie-in with the TATE’s forthcoming exhibition, taking place from 25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027 at TATE Modern on Bankside (Book tickets here!), it arrives with considerable fanfare and does its subject more than justice. And like all good documentaries, it seeks to tell us the things we don’t already know.

Kahlo’s life story has certain mythical qualities – perhaps that’s why it has proven so durable. The film traces the chronology of her life with care, anchoring each stage to the paintings she created at the time: the bus crash she survived at 18-years-old that shattered her collarbone, ribs and spinal column; her turbulent courtship and marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera; the devastating pain of her miscarriage; her time in America, a country she never quite warmed to; a long struggle with illness, including bronchopneumonia and severe depression and anxiety; and finally, the amputation of her leg in 1953, a year before her death.

None of this is presented as a catalogue of suffering, but as the raw material from which her art was forged – her contributors (all female, bar one) examining each work and linking it back to her life experience. Kahlo’s voice and sharp wit is made vivid throughout by extracts from her journals, brought to life by an actor dramatising these private moments. “I drank to drown my sorrows, but the bastards have learnt to swim” raises a smile even as it makes you ache, saying everything about the way she metabolised pain into something altogether more luminous.

The film is full of details most are unlikely to know. It opens, arrestingly, with The Dream (The Bed) selling for $55 million in November 2025, breaking the auction record for a work by a woman. We learn that she only held three private exhibitions in her lifetime and at the last, she was wheeled into the main exhibition space of her home, the Casa Azul, in her bed and of the over 150 paintings she completed, a third were self-portraits. The film poses the question this naturally invites: is this the secret of our enduring connection to her work? The documentary is particularly good at showing how her paintings present so many opposing versions of herself: the devoted wife, the sharp intellectual, the modern artist, the political firebrand. It reflects something true about all of us, that we are never just one thing. Throughout the decades, critics and curators have tried to apply a label to her and she always slips free. Surrealist? Revolutionary? Magic realist? Folk artist? That resistance to easy categorisation is, the film suggests, a significant part of what keeps her so compelling.

It also handles with equal sensitivity its exploration of queerness and gender in her work – how she presented herself in androgynous attire long before such expressions entered mainstream conversation, and interrogated ideas of gender fluidity with a frankness that feels startlingly contemporary. She was, in this as in much else, decades ahead of her time. The film closes with a section on “Fridamania,” the phenomenon of Kahlo as icon. Why are we so enduringly obsessed with her? What was it about the 1970s that sparked a renewed interest that has never dimmed?

The phenomenon is ironically embedded in the very capitalism that Kahlo rallied against. She may have been horrified by the tacky proliferation of her image on T-shirts, mugs, and clothing, yet there is something interesting in why different generations allow certain figures to become objects of cultural obsession, whether it’s Bob Dylan or Princess Diana. The answer the documentary arrives at feels right: we are not drawn to these people primarily because someone spotted a commercial opportunity, but because they articulate a kind of personal pain, a particular quality of human struggle, that most of us feel but cannot articulate. Kahlo did it in paint. We recognise ourselves in it, and we are grateful.

Frida Kahlo is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary artist, a film that takes its subject seriously without ever becoming reverential to the point of paralysis. Kahlo redefined what self-portraiture could do: how it could be at once beautiful and brutal, personal, and universal, intimate, and political. That is why, decades after her death, she remains so very difficult to look away from.

Frida Kahlo is in cinemas from 19^th May

Check your local cinema for screening information, and book your tickets for the TATE Modern Frida Kahlo exhibition here: tate.org.uk/frida-kahlo-the-making-of-an-icon