by Claire Wu

(May 18, 2026)

Created over the span of 16 years, “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” is a stunning patchwork of vérité footage, handmade dioramas and puppets, animation sequences and collages. This is not simply a film about grief, but rather a piece of ritual art that continuously meditates on all the highs and lows of Yo’s vibrant life and the integral role she played throughout the filmmaker’s lives as their dear friend.

“Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” made its world premiere at the 2026 Berlinale where it won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, and came to the Bay Area for its North American opening at the 68th San Francisco International Film Festival in April, 2026..

Directed by the Bay Area’s wife and husband duo Anna Fitch and Banker White, “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” is an intimate, meticulously tactile documentary celebrating the life and passing of Fitch’s long-time friend and Swiss immigrant, Yolanda — or “Yo” as we know her. Despite their nearly 50-year age gap, Fitch and Yo’s close bond transcends time and cultural background, as the film paints a vivid portrait of Yo’s remarkable, often idiosyncratic character.

I sat down with Anna and Banker to discuss their film, as remarkable as its subject.

Claire Wu: Anna, you’ve previously mentioned that premiering the film in Europe was significant to you, because that is where Yo is originally from. And now you guys are presenting the film here in California, where you are from and also where Yo had spent much of her later life. 

Does showing it here feel different from showing it at Berlinale?

Anna Fitch: Absolutely. One of the reasons we wanted to show it here as our North American premiere is that we both lived here for 20-plus years, and so many people who worked on the film are Bay Area-based. Yo’s whole family is nearby — some to the north, some to the south.

But they weren’t able to come to Berlin for the premiere because of the distance. A lot of them are older, but they all came and saw the Berkeley screening, which was amazing. And a lot of them are coming back to see it again on Saturday.

So really, just being able to have all the people — artists, family, friends — who’ve been watching this project evolve, or helping it come to fruition, all be in the same place is really special.

Banker White: And I feel like it’s a real California story. Of course, Pacific Grove was the first place Anna moved to in her 20s, and she moved in with Yo’s youngest daughter — that’s how they met.

But I also think of Yo, who was born in Switzerland, then moved to Australia after World War II, and landed in central California in the mid-’60s. For her, as this rebellious, totally individual person, 1960s California was the place where she finally found her tribe.

There are so many ways this state shaped Yo’s life. Of course, she lived in that house for 50 years, but I also think California was the first place where she felt, “These are my people.” And so many of those people, like Anna said, came to the screening — and tomorrow, a lot of them are going to join us again.

CW: Oh, wow. Well, what do you think a Bay Area audience might recognize in the film differently compared to a European audience? Kind of an open-ended question, but what do you guys think?

AF: A lot of Yo’s childhood stories take place in Europe, so many people who are European, or European immigrants, have told us they relate to those parts of her story.

And I think a lot of people who came to California and found their people — whether in the 1960s or later — will relate to that part of her story as well.

There’s also the beautiful California landscape: the cypresses by the shore, whether you’re in San Francisco, Big Sur or somewhere else up and down the coast. Those are really familiar sights and sounds.

BW: And I think culturally, the Bay Area has always valued what it means to be an individual. That’s so much of what I love about Yo: she was such an individual. She was born in Europe in 1924, but she continued to live life on her own terms.

In Berlin, the audience was very reactive — in a great way. They laughed at her jokes, and I wasn’t worried, but I did wonder if there was a particular attunement to her life experience, since she was born in Switzerland.

But Sunday was magical. The room really came alive. I think people found her wit and humor refreshing and funny. And the way Anna shows up in the film — you could feel the audience responding not just to the humor, or gasping at unexpected moments, but also settling into the quiet moments.

These are our first two festivals, so for us, it still feels very fresh to experience what the film actually feels like in a theater — to feel the audience reacting to what we have to share. So it was great.

CW: You talk about how Yo really found herself in the 60s in California: all this counterculture era stuff — she’s doing LSD at age 40 and smoking weed in her later life. 

I love how the film really honors her as a very multifaceted person. She has many contradictions — she’s loving, she’s difficult, idiosyncratic, intelligent — and ultimately, a free agent. 

How did you decide which contradictions to preserve rather than resolve?

AF: I think at various points, there was some pressure to show fewer of Yo’s faults because an audience might judge her. But that’s not how she lived her life.

So the stories that come together in the film are the ones that felt true to her life, and the ones we were interested in as people trying to figure out our own paths. Different people take different things from her stories and from her humor, so we just didn’t censor that.

BW: Yo talked a lot about religion in an interesting way. She describes her dad as a total atheist rebel, while her mom was very committed to the Catholic Church.

Especially after Yo passed, I thought a lot about what it meant to take on the responsibility of telling her story. It’s really a story about a beautiful friendship, but also about wanting to pay tribute to this incredible woman. That felt like a real responsibility: how do you deal with all these different aspects of someone who lived almost nine decades?

I used to think about the stories Yo wanted to tell us. Our recording sessions felt, especially as she neared the end of her life, almost confessional. But instead of confessing to a priest, she was speaking to a very close friend — someone she knew loved and understood her.

So in terms of your question about how much we chose to resolve, I thought about the things in her life: the words she chose, her relationships with her parents and her kids, and the level of resolution she seemed to be finding before she passed.

I feel like we made decisions that were very true to the way she shared herself with us. Her relationships with both of her parents, individually, and with her kids, seemed to be stories she kept coming back to. We tried to present them as honestly as she chose to talk to us about them.

AF: And we decided it wasn’t important to narratively fill in all of the information. It’s not totally clear in the film how many husbands she had, or which kids she had with which husbands, but we decided that kind of information wasn’t really what the film was about.

I never wanted to explain or translate Yo’s experience in my own words. I have my own interpretation of her life, of course, but that’s very clearly my interpretation. I wasn’t trying to create a historical record.

CW: I definitely felt like this was a film that evokes through visuals rather than simply telling, which is something I really appreciate about it. It also blurs memory, artful invention, and as you said, the confessional documentary footage.

Building on that idea, were there moments when imagination or creative rendition felt more truthful or evocative than the actual footage you had?

AF: Absolutely. Most of this film takes place in the middle room of her three-room shotgun shack. The production doesn’t leave this very small space, and some of the material is actually just audio-only recordings.

So there was a need for invention and creativity: to take what we had, which was really special, but not traditionally what you would build a film out of, in terms of footage and recordings, and bring some other element into it — something that could help it become a feature documentary.

That element wasn’t always clear. It wasn’t always obvious what the film was going to be, and that’s part of why it took 16 years to make.

BW: And in the second story in the film, she talks about her relationship with her dad. She had shared this single, amazing photo with us, where she looks exactly the way I would imagine Yo at 11 years old. Her dad is standing over her, and their posture and relationship to each other are so telling.

But that was really the only photo we had that represented her life in Chiasso — what she looked like there, and what she looked like with him. So that process of invention and creation became really important.

That was also one of our favorite audio-only stories, so it was one of the first moments where we had to ask: how do we build a whole world that represents and evokes all the deep emotional and psychological nuance of her telling, and make it feel like it matches?

For me, that was really exciting. We both have backgrounds in the arts, but this project kind of existed in a parallel universe in our lives. It has been a really fun and amazing creative project, because we both got to dig into our creative backgrounds.

AF: Banker has an MFA and went to CCA, and I went to alternative art schools.

BW: We’re in a performance art group, and that kind of background really fed into the film.

There was also a deeply personal element. I grieved losing Yo, and I lost my mother; we lost friends, and you lost a parent. There was so much processing of grief during the period when we were making this film.

There was something about the creativity — the tactile art practice we brought to it — that felt very cathartic.

AF: And once we tapped into that for ourselves, it just created space to do more of that.

CW: You mentioned that this film is meant to feel like ritual art. I feel like documentaries about grief often lean toward some kind of resolution, and I really appreciated that you resisted that impulse — that you didn’t neatly tie everything up by the end of the story.

Was that a conscious choice?

The film took 16 years to make, and a ritual is something you revisit over and over again. In that sense, the process seems to keep Yo’s memory very much alive.

Banker, you also mentioned that you guys collaborated on a film about your mother and her battle with Alzheimer’s, “The Genius of Marian.” How did that process differ from making a film about Yo — who was Anna’s great friend, and Anna’s loss?

BW: “The Genius of Marian” is a beautiful film, and there is creativity and raw emotion inside it. But the process of finishing it felt very different. I still have that film in my life, and I go back to it in my memory. My grieving process and the process of making sense of my mother’s illness is very unique to that film.

With “Yo,” we came back to the footage years after she had passed. In some ways, I could grieve my mother with some distance inside the project about Yo.

But when we came back to this art practice, it was really interesting. It was a little more removed, but I think it also went much deeper into the kind of ritual practice you’re talking about. To me, that feels very unique to this project.

It was almost lifelong. I learned so much — not just by watching you grieve, but through the way that process helped me think about all these other relationships.

AF: Yeah, “The Genius of Marian” was started and finished when Banker’s mom was still alive. We watched the premiere with her.

BW: Yeah, she sat in the audience in 2013 in Tribeca.

AF: And I really learned, from being a part of that process, how to film with Yo.

When we started filming with Yo, I didn’t see it as a film about grief. I saw it as a film about her — about what an amazing person she was — and I knew I wanted to record her and preserve these stories.

But in the years after she died, it became a film about grief. Then it became a film about moving through grief. And then it became a film that holds all of those different timelines in a somewhat interchangeable way.

I’m really glad we were able to make a film about loss that doesn’t feel like it’s only about sadness. It’s also full of fun and life.

BW: And with grief, like you said, I think what’s interesting is trying not to find a particular narrative resolution.

The thing that’s so interesting about grief, in general, is that even after you’ve moved through it, your relationship to Yo continues for as long as you’re alive. In some ways, Yo was almost resurrected in our lives through the art practice. She felt very present.

Sometimes, if you were to sort words into different buckets, people would associate grief with sadness — and of course, that’s true. But I also think it’s a much more complex process.

Part of what I saw happen with you was that hearing Yo’s voice again, and even thinking about how to re-engage with the project, was sad.

AF: At first, yeah.

BW: But then we also had times when we would just sit in our art room, play recordings of her voice, joyfully make art and laugh. Sometimes she felt so alive.

I think a lot of people have that experience with a grandparent, or with anyone who was really important to them. After you move past the most acute stage of realizing they’re gone in one particular way, that realization can allow them to come back in another way — in the way you understand what they gave you.

Anna and Yo loved going to thrift stores, garage sales and estate sales together. That was a huge part of their relationship. Even when Yo couldn’t walk, if there was one down the street, she would say, “Anna, go down there and pick up some stuff.”

There are little things like that. Every time you go thrifting, I feel like you’re thrifting with Yo a little bit, because it’s something special you shared together.

CW: Okay, I have one last question. 

The film is so whimsical and so meticulously handcrafted. You mentioned, I think, slow cinema as an influence in the media kit. And the puppets, miniatures, collages and animation are all so beautifully made.

It really feels like a breath of fresh air — like an antidote to the Bay Area’s current tech and AI culture of optimization. So I was wondering: was that contrast something you consciously considered while making the film, and while presenting it here in the Bay Area?

AF: In the beginning, no. In the end, yes.

This film went on for such a long time that, by the end, we did have the option to get some shots we needed using generative AI. And we were like, “No. We’ve come too far making this kind of art in community, and in relationship with people.”

That’s what makes the film special. And we stuck with that through the end.

BW: And there’s something to that. One of the hashtags I’ve been using on social media is “art takes time.”

I use AI in my writing practice, so I’m not totally against it. But in the credits, we call out that no generative AI was used, and I totally agree with you that it was a mindful choice.

I think there’s also something important about cinema, and what’s special about that word as opposed to “content.” Cinema has a social component to it, and that’s something I think is really special. If it isn’t regarded as special, then you can lose it.

So there’s something about the fact that the art took time. That’s one of the things that makes it special. We invited our friends, sat in community and built it together. It’s not really replicable in another way. And it takes time.

AF: Art takes time, yeah.

CW: Okay, that’s a great note to end on. All right, that’s it. Thank you so much!

“Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)” is starting its film festival tour and discussions about distribution are in process.

Check out the upcoming screenings here.

YoTheFilm website.

Instragram

All photos copyright by Mirabel Pictures.

Anna Fitch is an Emmy award-winning director who works in independent documentary, broadcast television, performance and visual art. Anna is best known for her creative approach to elevating unlikely protagonists in both the natural and human worlds. Most recently Anna directed OCTOPUS IN MY HOUSE which aired on BBC Natural World and PBS Nature and won Best Animal Behavior Film and Best Writing at Jackson Wild in 2020. SURVIVORS, the feature documentary that she co-directed, aired on PBS’ POV in 2018 and was nominated for Emmy and Peabody awards. She also co-directed the feature documentary THE GENIUS OF MARIAN, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, won the Grand Jury Award at Camden, and aired on POV in 2014. She won a directing Emmy for her film BUGWORLD in 2002.

Anna is also an artist whose work and performances have been featured at SFMOMA, National Gallery, Davis Symphony Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl.

Banker White is an interdisciplinary artist, award-winning filmmaker, and the Executive Director of Mirabel Pictures. From war and disease to the complex dimensions that surround aging and death, Banker’s work is united by a compassionate humanism. Most recently, Banker co-directed and produced the Peabody and Emmy award-nominated SURVIVORS (2018 IDFA/POV). He is the director and producer of the award- winning documentary THE GENIUS OF MARIAN. Banker also directed SIERRA LEONE’S REFUGEE ALL STARS (2007 POV /RedEnvelope).

Mirabel Pictures website.

Join the filmmakers on the Berlinale 2026 Red Carpet.

Claire Wu is a Bay Area local and film noir fanatic who studied English Literature at UC Berkeley. Her favorite directors are Harmony Korine, David Lynch and Billy Wilder. Previously, she has written for The Daily Californian and Mission Local, where she reviewed numerous films and interviewed filmmakers. She also posts media criticism and personal essays on her Substack. You can also follow her on Instagram and Tumblr.    She currently resides in San Francisco.