First Hand Films Acquires ‘YO Love Is a Rebellious Bird’ Ahead of World Premiere in Berlinale Competition (EXCLUSIVE)

First Hand Films has acquired international sales rights to “YO Love Is a Rebellious Bird,” directed by Anna Fitch and co-directed by Banker White, ahead of its world premiere in Berlinale competition.

The documentary follows Fitch as she spends a decade meticulously constructing a one‑third‑scale replica of her late friend’s house. It’s just large enough for Anna to slip through the door — and inside lives a puppet version of her friend Yo.

When the pair met, Yo was 73 and Anna just 24, but over almost two decades of friendship, they formed a deep bond that defies the gap in their ages and experiences. After Yo’s death, Anna re-constructs a space where Yo’s home, stories, and their relationship continue.

The film juxtaposes intimate vérité of Yo’s last year with Anna’s creative interpretations of Yo’s dramatic life stories. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Yo lived life on her own terms, defying expectations around sexuality, mothering, aging, and even death. As the film blurs memory, time and invention, it also reveals the power of artistic creation to channel – and share – grief and love.

“I met Yo when I was in my 20s and she in her 70s – it was a love-at-first-sight kind of friendship,” Fitch says. “Yo was many things to many people: a great-grandmother, career weed dealer, intellectual thought partner, psychic, hostess, and – at times – a tyrant. To me, she was an inspiration, a seer of truth. I wasn’t ready to lose her. A year before Yo’s death, Banker and I started filming our visits, but after she was gone, I couldn’t look at the footage for a long time. I wanted to spend time with the material things she’d left me – her old sweater, perfume, fabrics, or photographs. I began building a series of physical objects and ultimately constructed a one-third-scale version of Yo’s house and everything in it.

“The film’s narrative is built from stories Yo told me about her past – epic tales spanning eight decades and three continents, inviting us into her detailed memories and pivotal moments of transformation. I bring each story to life through handmade interpretations of her words using miniature sets of the house, puppetry, insect actors, and paper dioramas. I also appear in the film, moving through my own emotional journey in the 12 years after her passing. These layers weave together to explore the power of friendship, and what we learn from each other both in life and after death.”

“Anna and Banker (and Yo!) allow us to see cinema with new eyes while making it all look easy,” says Esther van Messel, founder and CEO of First Hand Films. “Sailing almost effortlessly through a world of love, grief and happiness, we kept being surprised by the visual and dramatical turns, enjoyed the world we’re in and the protagonists we spent time with. The elegant analog handwriting of filmmaking has nothing artificial about it, but all of the art. We couldn’t be prouder to continue our cooperation and present this rebellious bird to the world with Anna and her team.”

The film marks the latest chapter in a long‑standing collaboration between First Hand Films and the filmmakers, who have been working together since 2018, beginning with Fitch and White’s “Survivors.”

“YO Love Is a Rebellious Bird” is a production of San Francisco-based Mirabel Pictures, produced by Banker White, Sara Dosa and Hannah Roodman.