Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird) 

In Yo, documentary filmmaker Anna Fitch and her partner Banker White accompany her octogenarian friend Yolanda Shea as she makes her way out of this life. Bits and pieces of the film stem from informal interviews, raw conversations between the two women, which are not fully refined in the edit, leaving in the instances when a question had to be repeated or was misunderstood. 

The dedication to radical honesty also translates into the images: the elderly lady is shown taking a bath, or managing her pain with cannabis and opiates. 

Some of Shea’s narration is then set to more abstract images. Insects, caterpillars, cocoons have always been visual stand-ins for transformation, but in this particular case, they also speak to Fitch’s background in entomology. When Yo recounts an LSD trip, the director tries to find an audiovisual way of reliving this through colours and sounds.  

Beyond stylistic experimentation, Yo transcends the biographical documentary even further by fully integrating its filmmaker in the premise. Anna Fitch is shown building several dioramas of varying scales. One is a miniature model of the street Yolanda lived in, another is a doll’s house variation of her home, big enough for her children to climb into. Yolanda is recreated as a puppet. In a voice over, the director reveals that this way, for her, it felt as though she got to spend more time with her deceased friend. As a result she was in no hurry to finish the project. 

As Yo was afraid of chickens but tried to take care of the birds that came to visit her garden, one can easily understand the impulse to include Habanera from Carmen, from which the secondary title stems. Nevertheless, it remains one of the most overused pieces of classical music in film, and even here feels too familiar to the audience to achieve the desired effect. 

Near the end of the narrative, there is a moment that stands somewhat in opposition to the earlier brutal authenticity: Anna’s daughter reads a letter she supposedly wrote, narrating how the project helped her get to know Yo better. It ties up the film nicely, while feeling like something she may not have come up with of her own volition.  

The few dampening passages, however, do not devitalise this revolutionary approach to non-fictional storytelling. Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird) offers a tender portrait in memorandum and stands as an homage to a life lived without compromise. 

Selina Sondermann

Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird)  does not have a release date yet.

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