• Netflix announced a new series on Frida Kahlo, focusing on her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera.
• The project adapts Claire Berest’s biography and aims to present Kahlo’s story from a Mexican perspective.
• The series will explore the couple’s artistic partnership, politics, and infamous love affairs.

Less than six months after Frida Kahlo made history as the world’s priciest female artist, Netflix has announced a new series exploring Kahlo’s story, specifically through the lens of her relationship with muralist Diego Rivera.

Lead writer María Renée Prudencio is adapting the script from French author Claire Berest’s Kahlo biography, Rien n’est noir (2019). “The series is the story of a bomb wrapped in silk,” Netflix said in its announcement, subtly referencing Surrealist ringleader Andre Breton, who called Kahlo’s work “a ribbon around a bomb.” The news arrives one year after Netflix pledged $1 billion in Mexico-based productions.

This project hardly marks the first time Hollywood has taken on Kahlo. Dramatists and documentarians alike have repeatedly honored the artist—most famously in 2002, when Mexican-American actor Salma Hayek’s portrayal in Frida earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Art history has learned much about Kahlo since, though. In 2004, experts finally unsealed a bathroom at Casa Azul, where Kahlo spent most of her life, that held hundreds of documents and artworks pertaining to the couple, who’d stashed them there.

The forthcoming project, which hasn’t announced a cast or release date yet, also stands to benefit from an authentic Mexican perspective, courtesy of co-directors Patricia Riggen (known for 2007’s acclaimed film Under the Same Moon) and Gabriel Ripstein (behind 2015’s 600 Miles). Mexican actor and producer Monica Lozano will manage the undertaking.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

“I want to tell her relationship with Diego from a feminine and Mexican perspective, but also with a global lens, exploring their love, their conflicts and their artistic life together in a way that feels modern, intimate and powerful for new generations,” Riggen told Variety. Ripstein also noted that he hopes to transcend this love story’s ubiquitous talking points. “The series is a deconstructed, mischievous, and at times wild narrative,” he remarked. “It is built around two fundamental axes: their complex love relationship and their shared artistic life.”

The directors’ take will highlight the complex social and political circumstances that powered the distinctive oeuvres left behind by this revolutionary pair, often called “the elephant and the dove”—a phrase Kahlo’s mother coined while expressing disapproval ahead of their first marriage. And it was Marxism that kept them together throughout one divorce and a slew of extramarital affairs, including a tryst between Rivera and Kahlo’s younger sister, and another allegedly between Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of Kahlo to go around—a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston currently explores the making of her legend, and later this month, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will open a major show devoted to Kahlo and Rivera, based on a Metropolitan Opera production exploring their love.