Google “Bigfoot,” like I just did, and you might be surprised to find news reports of fresh sightings. Who knew? But whatever your awareness level regarding the legendary bipeds, Marq Evans’ new documentary is a fascinating exploration of a very specific piece of Americana, centering on a colorful collection of aging cowboys in Yakima, Washington. At the heart of the doc is the source material that kicked off a half-century-and-counting of hopeful believers, indefatigable hunters, and the industry that’s grown up around them: a 1967 piece of film clocking in at 59 seconds, its authenticity long debated, its grainy imagery minutely parsed.
Shot in California’s thickly forested far north and known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, it captures the vision of a female Bigfoot lumbering across a sandbar. For many, including some of the interviewees in Evans’ film, that shaky minute of 16mm footage is the holy grail, indisputable proof that Bigfoot — aka Sasquatch, Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman — walks the earth.
The Bottom Line Brimming with compelling characters.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Documentary Spotlight)Director: Marq EvansScreenwriters: Marq Evans, Michelle M. Witten 1 hour 43 minutes
After laying out the basic events and theories, Capturing Bigfoot discloses a lightning bolt of related evidence that recently fell into the hands of documentarian Evans (Claydream). If you’re not invested in the question of whether the ’67 footage is real or an elaborate hoax, you won’t find the newly discovered material explosive, but even so, its significance is resoundingly clear. It’s compelling not just within the context of the doc’s cast of characters and their conflicting testimony, but because of what their reaction to it reveals about the need to believe. For some, that belief became not just a lifelong interest, but a life-defining sense of purpose.
Among those who appear in new and vintage interviews are people who were on that fluvial patch of forest 59 years ago, and others who were directly affected by the fallout. This is a story of family, friends, neighbors — their bonds and their rifts. At the center of the doc is the engaging Clint Patterson, who was a schoolkid when his father, a former rodeo rider, spearheaded the making of the Bigfoot film and its promotion.
Roger Patterson wasn’t the first person to talk publicly about the creature, but he was the first to become officially obsessed. After reading of sightings on logging roads in Northern California, he began embarking on “expeditions” to capture evidence. Clint, who worshipped his dad, was his sidekick on those travels in a Volkswagen van retrofitted to make room for a couple of horses.
Averse to the 9-to-5 life but with a family to feed, Patterson decided his Sasquatch-hunting adventures could be a source of income, and set out to make a documentary about the mission, albeit one that put Bob Gimlin, his filmmaking partner and fellow Caucasian, in an “Apache” getup. Patterson self-published a book, Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?, and, after releasing his minute-long evidence of the huge creature, he appeared on national TV shows and was the subject of magazine articles. With his other partner in the venture, his businessman brother-in-law Al DeAtley, he took his movie on a barnstorming tour, four-walling it in auditoriums and theaters. In the pre-internet age, curious locals snapped up tickets to see the famous footage.
But just as all this was taking off, Patterson fell ill; he would be dead of Hodgkin’s lymphoma before he was 40. The person who profited from the movie was DeAtley, who, by all accounts here, including archival audio of his own comments, was a nasty character. One of his nephews recalls that the man’s business philosophy was “screw your help.” DeAtley, who hadn’t a shred of interest in the hunt for Bigfoot except for the money-making potential he saw in it, made a fortune, the better to fuel his struggling asphalt company and rise to the apex of Yakima society. Evans includes drone footage of the outsize fruits of his profit, a jaw-dropping monstrosity otherwise known as a house. (DeAtley died in 2019; his widow makes a notable, if brief, appearance in the doc.)
DeAtley aside, the figures in Capturing Bigfoot are exceptionally easy to like, even as the sense of who’s believable continually shifts, one of the most involving aspects of the documentary. The people who consider the Patterson-Gimlin film the real deal, at least the ones Evans spoke with, are not just smart but experts, among them a professor of anatomy, Jeff Meldrum, and a Hollywood makeup and VFX specialist, Bill Munns. Meldrum detects real mammalian musculature in the filmed creature, and Munns says it would not have been technically possible back then to make a Bigfoot costume as convincing as what’s seen in the film.
And then there’s Bob Heironimus, the self-proclaimed “toughest guy in Yakima,” who came forward in 1999 claiming to be the man who donned just such a costume to play Bigfoot for Roger Patterson’s camera. Believers didn’t like him. Gimlin, his neighbor and onetime friend — and perhaps the doc’s most charismatic and inscrutable subject — stopped speaking to him. Greg Long was similarly loathed and demonized by the Bigfoot faithful after publication of his 2004 book, The Making of Bigfoot, which concluded that Patterson was a con artist and his film a hoax.
Excerpts from the audiocassettes of Long’s interviews are a strong element of Evans’ doc, and playful music cues underscore the humor and passion that course through this particularly American saga, along with a whole lot of pain. Roger Patterson’s widow, appearing before a camera to discuss the matter for the first time, deems the 1967 film “a living-hell curse.” A charming fellow who calls himself the Sasquatch Sleuth, Larry Lund, has spent 60 years hunting for Bigfoot. He notes, with a twinge of regret, that his mentor René Dahinden, a Swiss-Canadian cryptozoologist who died in 2001 and is a vivid, straight-talking presence here in archival material, left his wife and children to dedicate himself to the search.
Devoting time to both sides of the debate over the short film, Evans presents reasonable conflicting arguments. And he reveals that it isn’t always easy to apply Occam’s razor when facing a dilemma. Struggling to reconcile the new material Evans has shown him with what he already knows and believes, a somewhat dazed Meldrum (who died in late 2025) notes that “the simplest explanation is uncomfortable to arrive at.”
Discounting the Patterson-Gimlin film is one thing; disproving the existence of giant humanoid creatures is another. Leaps between logic and conviction are nothing new, though we might be living in a particularly vexing time on that front, and it’s likely that many true believers will dismiss Evans’ film just as they did Long’s book. A whole culture and industry revolve around Bigfoot. There are museums in Oregon and California as well as conventions where Gimlin, now in his 90s, has become a beloved fixture — and where Heironimus and Clint Patterson pay him a surprise visit, caught on film before event organizers usher them away.
With his openness and emotion and willingness to forgive, it’s Clint Patterson who anchors Capturing Bigfoot. As children, he and his siblings kept their dying father company in a shed on their property, where he gave himself radiation therapy with a cobalt machine. Fifty-nine years after Clint’s buck-riding dad became famous for a bit of film shot in the wilderness, it’s easy to still see the kid in him, the young boy who lost his hero — more than once.
