BFI London 2024

Bigfoot Goes to London: Sasquatch Syndicate at the 68th BFI London Film Festival 2024

Nobody tells you that being a filmmaker from the Pacific Northwest who has spent years chasing Bigfoot through old-growth forests is surprisingly good preparation for navigating London.  Both involve moving through large, ancient environments where the atmosphere is thick, the terrain is unfamiliar, and something extraordinary could appear around any corner. Both reward patience, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to be surprised. And in both cases, you are almost certainly underdressed for the weather.

Chuck Geveshausen, host and founder of the Sasquatch Syndicate, and the full Sherpa Networks production crew crossed the Atlantic Ocean on Delta to attend the 68th BFI London Film Festival — twelve days of world-class cinema, director conversations, short film programs, industry access, and storytelling craft at the highest level the medium has to offer.

It was one of the most valuable professional experiences any of us had ever had. It also involved a near-catastrophic encounter with British food, a desperate citywide search for ice cubes, and the moment Indian cuisine became the unanimous hero of the entire trip.

Oh — and Sherpa Networks? London loved them. But we'll get to that.

Seattle to Heathrow: Delta Carries the Crew Across the Pond
The Pacific Northwest to London is not a short flight. Delta got us there, and somewhere over the North Atlantic — probably around the point where Greenland appears out the left window like a reminder that the world is very large — the significance of what we were doing started to settle in.

A Bigfoot podcast and production company from Washington State was heading to one of the most prestigious film festivals on the planet. The Sherpa Networks crew — the same team that produces, films, edits, and helps bring other creators' visions to life — was about to walk into rooms full of international filmmakers, distributors, directors, and industry professionals from 79 countries.

The imposter syndrome was real. The excitement was considerably realer.

We landed at Heathrow and checked into the Marriott — exactly the right call after a transatlantic red-eye. Comfortable, professional, close enough to breathe before the city demanded our full attention. The beds were excellent. The rest was earned. And the following morning, London was waiting.

A Day to Breathe: Boddingtons, Big Ben, and the First Warning Sign
Before the festival opened in earnest, we gave ourselves a day of recovery and acclimatization. Not racing between landmarks with a guidebook — just walking, absorbing, letting the enormity of the city work on us at a pace we could actually process.

London is not subtle. It does not ease you in. It simply is — ancient and enormous in every direction, operating at full volume whether you're ready or not.
We found a proper pub. Chuck ordered a Boddington's — cold, draft, cream-topped, the way it is meant to be served — and for a glorious forty-five minutes, every single thing was right with the world.
Then someone ordered the fish and chips.

The Pea Situation: A Crisis in Several Acts

We need to talk about the peas.  British cuisine is a proud tradition with a rich history, and we say everything that follows with complete respect for the culture: Chuck Geveshausen does not like peas. This is not a casual preference. This is not a mild dietary quirk that can be managed with polite workarounds. This is a deeply held, firmly established, non-negotiable position that Chuck has maintained his entire life and sees absolutely no reason to revisit on foreign soil.

England, as it happens, is extremely committed to peas. Mushy peas specifically — the kind that arrive alongside fish and chips not as a polite garnish but as a warm, enthusiastic, default component of the plate that takes up significant real estate and radiates confidence about being there.

Chuck was not prepared for the mushy peas. Nobody on the team had adequately warned him. They appeared next to his fish and chips like they owned the table, and the expression on Chuck's face was — cinematically speaking — a masterpiece of controlled alarm and quiet personal betrayal.

• The shepherd's pie also had peas in it.
• The pot pie had peas.
• Several soups in London, it emerged, had a pea-related agenda.

There was a diplomatic moment at the pub where it was gently suggested that Chuck could simply eat around the peas. He considered this for a moment. He declined. He set the plate to one side with the calm, final energy of a man who has made a decision and is fully at peace with it.

The Boddington's, however, remained exceptional throughout. No peas in the Boddington's. Full marks.

Ice: An InvestigationHere is something they do not include in travel guides to the United Kingdom: ice is considered a specialty item rather than a standard component of a cold beverage.

In Washington State, ice is automatic. You sit down, a drink arrives, the drink has ice, nobody discusses it because that is simply how beverages work and everyone understands this. In London — discovered with increasing frequency across multiple days, meals, and establishments — ice is something you specifically request, may receive two to three cubes of, and will occasionally be regarded with a look of mild curiosity for wanting at all.

The team adapted with reasonable grace. We drank things at whatever temperature they arrived. We did not complain to staff. We did, however, discuss the ice situation among ourselves at a frequency that, in retrospect, was probably slightly disproportionate to its actual geopolitical importance.

It's the small things. Especially when you're very far from home and your dinner has mushy peas in it.

Indian Food: The Hero of This Story
On the second evening, someone proposed Indian food and that person was Chuck recalling he and Lyle Blackburn talking about Indian Food in London, on an old podcast.

This was, without question, the single best idea generated by any member of the Sasquatch Syndicate or Sherpa Networks crew during the entire trip. Given that the trip included attending one of the world's great film festivals, this is not a statement we make lightly.

London's Indian cuisine is extraordinary. This is well-established and thoroughly deserved — the curry houses and Indian restaurants of the UK represent one of the finest culinary traditions anywhere in the world, and sitting down to a proper curry dinner — warm, deeply spiced, richly layered, and completely, wonderfully free of mushy peas — was the moment the whole trip clicked into place.

Cold drinks managed to a satisfactory level. Naan bread arriving in quantities that satisfied. Chuck genuinely content with his plate for the first time since Heathrow. The crew looked at each other across the table and collectively exhaled.
This. This was going to work.

Indian food carried us through the rest of London with full stomachs, restored morale, and an appreciation for the British South Asian culinary tradition that we will be talking about for years. We went back more than once. We are not ashamed of this. We recommend it to everyone.

Sherpa Networks in London:
"Everyone Needs a Sherpa"Now — here is the part of the trip that genuinely surprised us, in the best possible way.
The Sasquatch Syndicate team travels with Sherpa Networks — our production company and the creative engine behind the show, the shoots, the editing, and the media infrastructure that makes everything we do actually work. Sherpa Networks (sherpanetworks.com) exists on a simple and powerful premise: every creator, every filmmaker, every production needs a guide. Someone to help navigate the terrain. Someone who knows the mountain.

We brought Sherpa Networks cards to London without enormous expectations about what would happen with them. We were attending a film festival, not running a sales operation. We were there to learn.

What we didn't fully anticipate was how the name, the logo, and the concept would land in a room full of international filmmakers.

Everywhere we went at the BFI — in the industry hub at Picturehouse Central, in the lobby conversations at BFI Southbank, in the Q&A sessions and hallway exchanges and dinner conversations that are the real connective tissue of any great festival — the moment Sherpa Networks came up, people leaned in. Independent filmmakers from the UK, Europe, and beyond who are trying to navigate distribution, production support, content strategy, and the increasingly complex landscape of getting their work seen and funded.

The cards went out. The conversations happened. The leads came in.
Sherpa Networks walked away from London with genuine new connections — filmmakers and creators who need exactly what Sherpa offers, who found us in the last place any of us expected to find new business: a London film festival where we'd gone purely to grow as storytellers.

Those leads were significant. They helped justify the trip financially in a way that transformed what could have been a purely educational investment into something that also moved the business forward. That's the Sherpa model in action: show up to help, be genuinely useful, and the work follows.

Everyone needs a Sherpa. London agreed.

The Festival: Where the Real Work Happened
Rested, fed, newly connected, and operating with a clarity that only a great curry dinner can provide, the team stepped fully into the 68th BFI London Film Festival — and the scale of it hit immediately.

The festival welcomed more than 815 international and UK filmmakers, immersive artists, and series creatives to present their work across London. The program featured 253 works — features, shorts, series, and immersive pieces — from 79 countries in 63 languages, with 39 world premieres and 12 international premieres across twelve days. It was, by every measure, a full global celebration of the moving image at its highest level, and we were inside it.

The primary home was BFI Southbank on the Thames — the London Eye visible from the entrance in a way that feels almost aggressively cinematic, like the city itself is trying to be in the shot. Screenings spread across Curzon Soho, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Royal Festival Hall, and partner venues through the city.

Steve McQueen's Blitz opened the festival on October 9th, starring Saoirse Ronan in a World War II story of stunning scope and intimacy — an immediate statement of intent about what the next twelve days would offer. Andrea Arnold's Bird, built almost entirely from first-time actors, showed what raw truth in the hands of a masterful director can produce. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in We Live in Time delivered emotional precision that made us examine every scene we'd ever filmed and ask whether we'd found the truth in it.

The short film programs were among the most instructive sessions of the entire festival. Shorts are where filmmakers solve hard problems with no margin and no guarantee of audience. The craft required to deliver a complete, emotionally resonant story in ten to fifteen minutes is exceptional — and watching filmmaker after filmmaker pull it off across multiple programs gave us more practical creative insight than almost anything else we experienced. As a production team that works in episodic audio and video storytelling, the lessons from those short film sessions were directly applicable to everything we make.

Director Q&As and production-focused panels gave us something even rarer: honest, candid conversations about process. How scenes get shaped. What gets cut and why. How filmmakers maintain creative integrity while navigating budget reality. How you carry someone else's true story with the responsibility it deserves. In the BFI environment — with industry audiences and serious film critics in the room — nobody is giving polished press junket answers. They're talking straight. And we were there taking notes.

What We Brought HomeHere is the honest reflection that every serious creative professional owes themselves after attending something like the BFI London Film Festival: you come home different. Not in a vague, motivational-quote way. In a specific, practical, sit-down-and-rethink-your-workflow way.

We came back thinking differently about structure. About pacing. About the relationship between sound and emotional truth — which matters enormously for a production team that builds atmosphere out of audio. About the difference between a story that is delivered and a story that is felt.

The Sasquatch Syndicate tells true stories — witness accounts, field research, the genuine human emotion of encountering something you cannot explain. That is documentary territory. It requires the same discipline, the same structural clarity, and the same commitment to earned emotional response that the world's best documentary filmmakers bring to their work. Watching those filmmakers at BFI — understanding how they build trust with subjects, how they handle the responsibility of carrying someone else's truth — sharpened instincts we didn't even fully know we had.

Sherpa Networks came home with new clients, new relationships, and a clearer sense of how the company's services resonate with the independent filmmaking community globally.

The team came home full — on curry, on knowledge, on the specific satisfaction of having shown up somewhere extraordinary and made it count.

Thank You, London. Mostly
To the BFI and every filmmaker who made the 68th London Film Festival what it was — thank you. What you built across those twelve days reminded us why storytelling matters and raised the standard for everything we're going to make next.

• To the Sherpa Networks crew — you showed up, you represented, and London noticed. That's everything.
• To Delta Airlines — dependable. Appreciated. No complaints.
• To the Marriott Heathrow — exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it.
• To the Boddington's draft — a genuine highlight. Truly no notes whatsoever.
• To the Indian restaurants of London — you are heroes. Unambiguous, unconditional heroes. The Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks owe you a debt that can only be repaid in return visits and enthusiastic word of mouth to every American filmmaker we know who is heading your direction.
• To British cuisine broadly — we respect you. We understand you. Mushy peas are simply not for us and we have made complete peace with that.
• To whoever manages the ice supply across London's hospitality industry — we would like to revisit this topic. Thoughtfully. With evidence.

The search — for Bigfoot, for great stories, for new clients, and apparently for a properly iced beverage — continues.

Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State-based podcast and nonprofit dedicated to Bigfoot research and eyewitness outreach across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Find us wherever you stream podcasts.

Sherpa Networks is the production company behind Sasquatch Syndicate, providing guided media solutions for creators, filmmakers, and brands. Learn more at https://www.sherpanetworks.com.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.