Netflix will develop a series about the life and relationship of Mexican cultural icons Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as part of its strategy to expand content in Mexico.
According to a statement released by Netflix, the series will explore the couple’s intimate life as well as the cultural and political context of their work during a time of profound transformation in Mexico.
“The series is the story of a bomb wrapped in silk; a bomb that is the two of them, that is Mexico, and that is, inevitably, the entire world,” the streaming company said.
With a title yet to be decided, the story will delve into the couple’s love and betrayals as they create their artistic works in a “context in constant effervescence,” Netflix said.
“[The series] follows the story of a woman who refuses to be just a muse and decides to tell her own version of pain, and of a man struggling to sustain his creative genius in the face of his contradictions,” Netflix said.
The series will be directed by Patricia Riggen and Gabriel Ripstein, filmmakers with experience in stories based on real events and on Latin American politics and society.
This will not be the first time Kahlo’s story has been brought to the screen. In 2002, Salma Hayek Kahlo starred in and produced a film titled “Frida,” which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including a Best Actress nomination for Hayek (the award went to Halle Berry that year)
Earlier, the Mexican director Paul Leduc created a more artistic and less commercial film about Frida starring Ofelia Medina.
This time around, however, Kahlo and Rivera’s life will be portrayed for the small screen.
“The fact that it’s a series and not a film gives us a very broad canvas to break away from what everyone knows,” Riggen told newspaper El País. “We don’t want to fall into the trap of a stuffy period piece, a magical Mexico, or the obvious. That’s already been told.”
Carolina Leconte, content VP of Netflix Mexico, told Variety that the project is “a daring proposal that takes us into the most intimate spaces of two figures we feel have been exhausted by myth, but whose true story we have not yet dared to face directly.”
With reports from Aninews
