Most people will definitely “fall for it” the first two or three times. Here we see the living room of Yolanda Shea's (Yo for short) tiny house in the Californian town of Pacific Grove. But instead of a person, an oversized hand suddenly comes through the door to put the tea on the table. The arm belongs to the director Anna Fitch, who will later appear gigantic in the background above the rooftops. The women met in 1997. Shea was already 73 at the time and Fitch was only 24, but they hit it off immediately. After her friend's death, the filmmaker recreated her house with all the details on a scale of 1:3 in a deceptively realistic manner – as a slow farewell and to complete the documentary “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)”, which began in the last year of Yo's life.
Fitch has already made a thoroughly subjective, similarly experimental documentary with her co-director/husband Banker White: “The Genius Of Marian” (2013) is about Fitch's stepmother, who, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, wants to write a book about her own mother before the memories finally dissolve. But in preparation for “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird),” an earlier work may have been even more valuable: After studying entomology, Fitch first produced nature documentaries about the lives of insects for television. She was awarded an Emmy for her first work, “Living With Bugs: War Of Two Worlds” (2002). “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)” succeeds again and again in creating large images in tiny worlds.
Anna Fitch puts the finishing touches to her 1:3 scale model of her late friend's cottage.
Insects are also used in “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)”. When Yo remembers a particularly terrible family gathering after her mother's death, Fitch illustrates it with cockroaches sitting around the lavishly laid table – and shamelessly leaving with the dead's jewelry. Far less disturbing are the repeated time-lapse shots of caterpillars shedding their skin. Certainly a metaphor for the protagonist herself, who has also completely reinvented herself again and again in her life. Growing up in Switzerland, she escaped the confines of her home village for America, where her first marriage with two children ultimately failed because after her first (nightmarish) LSD trip, Yo simply no longer found any connection to her surroundings.
In the period that followed, she preferred to be homeless rather than confined until she moved into her current house, where she has lived for 42 years at the beginning of the film. The “rebellious” in the subtitle is definitely not an exaggeration, and you can tell that not only from the many bulging bags of cannabis that are constantly lying around on the table: When she was 15 years old, her father tormented her with her chicken phobia so much that she didn't speak to him for a long time until she was deported to a distant boarding school. She also contradicted the (verbally abusive) priest during confession so much that she was banned from the church.
Anna Fitch even finds a completely new way of staging the argument between young Yo and her father.
Yo has lost a lot of physical strength; even after minor exertion, she can only breathe with the support of morphine drops. But mentally she is still in top shape – and above all, she has lost none of her rebellious streak, even in her old age and frail condition. “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)” is not a classic documentary in which the director researched everything again. She limits herself entirely to her friend's anecdotes, which she brings to life in her model buildings with incredible effort – for example by placing cameras herself in the back seat of a miniature car. However, this also means that the work of Yo, herself an artist, is given very little space in the film – one would have liked to have seen a lot more in this respect.
Instead, the director's own grieving process is integrated into the making of the film, which has the potential to seem overly self-centered. However, Yo ensures that “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)” doesn't slip into sentimentality thanks to her completely not self-pitying nature. And if you get bored at any point, just play a guessing game from the film: just guess at the beginning of each shot whether we are in the real world, in a model or even in a combination of both. Over the course of the 76-minute playing time, you will certainly get better and better at paying attention to the right clues – but you can never really be 100 percent sure until the end…
Conclusion: An extraordinary film about an extraordinary person, even if the rebellious protagonist's own art is conspicuously neglected.
We saw “Yo (Love Is A Rebellious Bird)” at the Berlinale 2026, where it celebrated its world premiere in the official competition.