‘Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)’ Review: A Moving Documentary Memorial Through a Decade of Puppets and Miniatures

With the documentary “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird),” Anna Fitch and her co-director and husband Banker White appear to have set out to make a film about life, which, during its lengthy, decade-long making, turned into a film about death. To memorialize her late friend Yolanda Shea, or Yo — a Swiss artist 50 years her senior — Fitch, a Californian puppeteer, obsessively re-creates miniature models of Yo’s home and neighborhood, scenes of which are interspersed with interviews of her late companion from when she was alive. The result is a sentimental arts-and-crafts project given cinematic form, in ways that occasionally blur the line between reality and artistic representation.

It begins with still frames of Yo’s X-rays, as images of her artificial hips are scored by playful conversations between the duo, whose enormous age gap is no hurdle for the love they share. These soon give way to montages, collages,…