San Francisco-based Anna Fitch is surely the only filmmaker in Berlin this week to have arrived at the festival with a puppet of her main character in her hand luggage.
“I feel like the puppet will definitely be with us on the red carpet. Whether she comes to the press conference with us or not…sure, why not,” she tells Business Doc Europe a couple days before the premiere.
Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird), which she co-directed with her creative partner and husband Banker White, is also the only documentary in the Berlin competition this year. The film (sold by First Hand Films) features the puppet prominently. It is of her real-life friend Yolanda Shea, Yo for short, who inspired the movie. When they first met, Yo was 73 and Fitch was in her mid-20s. That didn’t stop them hitting it off immediately. For 15 years, until Yo’s death in 2013, they were best pals. Fitch has kept her memory alive by painstakingly constructing not only the very lifelike puppet of her but a 1/3 scale version of her home.
Yo was an eccentric and a visionary. Fitch has characterised her as “a great-grandmother, career weed dealer, intellectual, psychic, hostess, tyrant, a captivating storyteller.” Born in Switzerland in 1924, she had a difficult childhood but was eventually sent to art school in Basel with all the other “kooks,” as her father calked them. Here, she blossomed, studying alongside such notable figures as Swiss sculptor, Jean Tinguely and artist, Eva Aeppli, who became close friends.
By the 60s, at the height of the counter culture era, Yo was living in California. That’s when she had a bad but very formative acid trip, a key moment in the story the documentary tells. “It was very significant, a real turning point,” Fitch notes. “I think she went to the precipice. It’s a dangerous place to go. She could have died or lost her mind and she fought her way out.”
After that experience, Yo made radical changes to her life, separating from her husband and striking out on her own.
Following Yo’s death, Fitch at first couldn’t bring herself to watch the footage she had shot. For a period, it looked as if the movie would stall. “I thought it would bring me solace to have these recordings – and I found it just upsetting and confusing. All I could see at first was what I didn’t ask her, what I didn’t say and didn’t record. I couldn’t see what we had. I could only see what we didn’t have.”
That’s partly why she set about reconstructing her subject’s life – and building a puppet facsimile of her. At the time, though, she was still feeling a wrenching grief.
“Making her house was three or four years after she died. It was the first time in many years that I cried. I had to move through something. Then I began to enjoy the footage. I began to see things in the footage. Banker saw some amazing things in the footage…even building her own entire house and the puppet is part of when you lose someone and you don’t want to let them go, how do I bring her back? As a filmmaker, you get to invent your own world and your own reality.”
In the film, Fitch admits that one reason she has worked on the project for so long is still to have Yo still close to her. However, now she has finally finished the documentary, she sounds relieved.
“It feels good and I feel like the process of bringing it to the world is very dynamic and alive, and Yo feels present in that too.”
“Having the puppet here really makes it feel like she is here in spirit,” the director adds.
“Art takes time,” White always used to tell her. In this case, it was a great deal of time. Playwright and puppet maker Robin Frohardt helped her design the remarkably life-like doll representing Yo. Percussionist and band leader Simon Cheffins, one of the founding members of Extra Action Marching Band, assisted in the building of Yo’s house.
“The process and the time that went into the work became part of my emotional journey, moving through grief,” Fitch says. “The project lasted 16 years. We made other films in that time and really didn’t start building things until we built the puppet in 2016.”
Along the way, Fitch and White received both film grants and art grants. They were given “a lot of time and space” at artists’ residencies. On the long journey toward completing the film, they have done “a lot of open studios and art shows of the building of the house in process…we invited people into those. We would show clips. People would put on headphones, listen to Yo telling a story, and then walk over to the real house.”
All this early experimentation with installations gave the filmmakers insights into “where the emotional power” of the film lay, and they edited and shaped it accordingly.
Fitch’s background is an entomologist. She has made several films featuring insects among them Bugworld Part One and Two (2002), which she directed with David Allen. That also helped here, for example in the extraordinary scene when she shows two of Yo’s relatives fighting over a carpet, representing them with stick insects having a tug of war.
Yo’s many relatives have supported the project, which started when the subject was still alive and has obviously carried on long after her death. “This process has been slow so I think it was, in some ways, fairly easy for them to get used to it. Even more than that, Yo is such an individual and did things her own way. Her kids are very used to her making her own decisions.”
The documentary is also very much hand-crafted. As the end credits tell us, “no generative AI was used in the making of this film.”
AI “came on the scene” anyway when Fitch and White had already spent many years working on the project. ”For us, part of this process is human interaction. It’s relationships. The creative process, the way Banker and I engage in it, is very collaborative. I feel like Yo is a collaborator. Her son, Peter, started doing incredible art after she died…all the artists we worked with are such an incredible part of it [the documentary] and that is something you can’t do with AI – you can’t form bonds and community.”
The Yo documentary is produced by Sara Dosa (director of Fire Of Love) and Hannah Roodman. It was made through Mirabel Pictures, the company set up by White and Fitch in 2010.
“The experience of making this film has changed my relationship with grief. I think grief is different for everyone. As much as I can feel joy and move past it, that deep sadness is there…but I want to let myself feel those feelings sometimes,” the director explains how making the documentary has both helped her come to terms Yo’s death and given her the opportunity to celebrate her friend’s extraordinary life in the most vivid way imaginable.
