Martha’s Vineyard filmmakers Anna Fitch and Banker White took their two children on an unusual February vacation this year, attending the Berlin Film Festival and coming home with a juried award for the documentary Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird).
Their film makes its North American premiere later this month, at the San Francisco Film Festival in the family’s former hometown.
A Vineyard premiere has yet to be scheduled for the film, which was made here and in California over the past decade and a half.
Both 14-year-old Dylan White and her 11-year-old brother Oscar appear in Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird), which their parents had been working on together since before the siblings were born.
Ms. Fitch gestures to the model of Pacific Grove neighborhood created in their West Tisbury studio.
— Ray Ewing
“They were considered kind of like official cast at the premiere, and… I think it was a pretty amazing experience for them,” Mr. White said, during an interview at the couple’s home studio near Stillpoint in West Tisbury.
“To do the whole red carpet thing,” Ms. Fitch added, smiling at the memory.
When it came time for an official portrait at the Berlin festival, however, the Fitch-White family demurred.
“One of the rituals of the competition films is that you get a star portrait. It’s usually directors and main cast,” Mr. White said.
Instead of striking a pose for the cameras, he and Ms. Fitch convinced the festival organizers to photograph a handcrafted puppet of the documentary’s subject, Yolanda (Yo) Shea.
A free-spirited Swiss immigrant born in 1923, Ms. Shea was in her 70s and Ms. Fitch nearly 50 years younger when the two met while thrift-shopping and quickly became best friends.
“She was charming and fun and smart, and I think age just sort of fell away,” Ms. Fitch said.
After Mr. White came into Ms. Fitch’s life, he was pulled into Ms. Shea’s orbit as well. The couple often made the drive from San Francisco to her home in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, to spend time with her.
They also recorded Ms. Shea as she went about her daily activities and talked about her unconventional life, marked from childhood by a determined refusal to accept the 20th-century norms that limited women’s achievement.
Banker White displays a model house they created for the film.
— Ray Ewing
“She was incredibly comfortable and unapologetic with who she was, and… she really lived life without regrets, without second-guessing herself,” Ms. Fitch said.
Always frank, Ms. Shea was particularly open to the couple’s camera because she admired their documentary about Mr. White’s mother and her struggle with early Alzheimer’s.
That film, The Genius of Marian, was released in 2013. Ms. Shea died the same year, leaving Ms. Fitch so bereft she couldn’t even look at the footage of her friend.
But three years later, she commissioned an artisan to build the puppet of Ms. Shea, complete with hair from Ms. Fitch’s head and a face hand-painted by Mr. White.
After that, Ms. Fitch decided, the puppet had to feel at home.
“We started the house because the puppet needed somewhere to sit,” said Ms. Fitch, who ultimately recreated Ms. Shea’s Pacific Grove house, with every detail in place, at one-third scale.
“The house started to evolve and change and just become part of our lives,” she said.
During this process, the documentary changed as well, Ms. Fitch said.
“I was never planning on being in the film. That’s something that evolved later,” she said.
What finally emerged from this long mourning period is a deeply personal, yet highly imaginative film that celebrates both Ms. Shea’s life and the enduring friendship she shared with Ms. Fitch.
A heartfelt and creative take on documentary filmmaking.
— Ray Ewing
Mixing live footage with animation was just the start for Ms. Fitch and Mr. White, who also used live praying mantises — now living as pets in the studio — and a prize rooster named Lenny in some of the film’s more surrealistic moments.
They also recreated Ms. Shea’s entire Pacific Grove neighborhood — complete with ramshackle fences, rampant greenery and telephone poles towering over crowded blocks of small frame houses — in their West Tisbury studio, with help from Islander Tim Laursen.
In the film, tiny models of Ms. Fitch and Ms. Shay drive through the streets in a die-cut station wagon, perhaps on their way to hit a thrift shop or grab some groceries for dinner.
“When someone you love dies, there was more that you wanted,” Ms. Fitch said. “Trying to fill in what was missing, and being artists, is how all of this came about.”
Island nonprofit Circuit Arts took a hand in readying Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) for the festival circuit, hosting a private screening of the rough cut last year.
“It was great to just feel the emotions in the room and people laughing — and in the quiet, more difficult moments, you could kind of feel just that magic thing that happens in a cinema,” Mr. White said.
Encouraged by the Island feedback, he and Ms. Fitch were practically bowled over by their reception in Berlin.
“[It was] amazing, beyond expectations — just so, so fun, so, so nice to hear people react to the film and in a positive way,” she said.
The Berlin festival’s Silver Bear Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution now rests on a shelf in the West Tisbury studio alongside a collection of other trophies, among them an Emmy for Ms. Fitch’s public television documentary BugWorld: War of Two Worlds (2003), and a best-documentary buoy from the Camden International Film Festival, among other honors, for The Genius of Marian.
An entomologist by training, Ms. Fitch has won multiple awards for co-directing BugWorld.
The couple also work with a filmmaking collective in Sierra Leone that was nominated for a Peabody Award for its work documenting Ebola virus survivors.
Mr. White said they hope to schedule a Vineyard premiere of Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) this summer.
Other markets also have expressed interest, he said.
“We’ve had a lot of requests for screeners and [festival] invitations, in Europe and in Asia and South America,” Mr. White said.