Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)
Through beautifully constructed miniature sets and puppets, directors Anna Fitch and Banker White craft an elegy to the life and times of Anna’s beloved friend, Yo.
Description
One of director Anna Fitch’s closest friends, Yo was adventurous, self-assured, and headstrong. Before Yo passed away in 2013, Fitch spent countless hours capturing memories and anecdotes of Yo’s colorful life. That documentation became a broader project through which Fitch processed her grief as she crafted a meticulous miniature recreation of the home where Yo spent her final years. In Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird), Fitch and co-director Banker White meld together Fitch’s cherished vérité footage with stunning puppet recreations and the miniature home to memorialize Yo in all her highs and lows. By harnessing the craft of puppetry to explore Yo’s life in Switzerland, her struggles with motherhood, and experiences with aging on her own terms, this hybrid documentary becomes a whimsical record of friendship and the love that bloomed between Fitch and Yo. —Amber Love
Biographies
Anna Fitch is director, writer, and producer. She burst on the scene with BugWorld: War of Two Worlds (2002), winning a News & Documentary Emmy Award for her direction. Her other work includes The Genius of Marian (2013), Survivors (2013), and many science and natural history documentaries for PBS, National Geography, and Channel 4 UK. With Banker White, she was a 2019 Resident at Marin Headlands for the Arts.
San Francisco native Banker White won AFI Fest’s Documentary Award for his first feature Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (2005). He is the Executive Director of Mirabel Pictures, and he co-founded the WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center, a collaborative media project in Sierra Leone. In addition to Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird), with his wife and creative partner Anna Fitch, he directed The Genius of Marian (2013) and Survivors (2018).
