Although she’s a recent widow and nearly always broke, wild horses couldn’t drag Tabatha Zimiga away from her South Dakota ranch. She is embedded in the landscape as immutably as the ancient Badlands rock formations that border her ranch. She’s a horse trader and known in those parts as a genuine horse whisperer. Heavily tattooed and sporting a half-buzzed blond head of hair, Tabatha cuts a distinctive figure. For marginal profits, she trains and trades in kill-pen horses that are bound for slaughter. Tabatha also takes in teens who readily flock to her when they’re in need of a real home. Her daughter Porshia and some of the other girls prep and show off the animals at regular auctions and in TikTok videos.
East of Wall, which received the Audience Award for the Sundance Film Festival NEXT section, is a narrative film that writer/director Kate Beecroft fashioned from biographical realities taken from the characters’ real lives. Tabatha, Porshia, and the other kids are nonprofessional actors, while industry vets Scoot McNairy and Jennifer Ehle step into roles as an interested buyer of Tabatha’s 3,000-acre ranch and Tabatha’s mother, respectively. The film’s imagery appears as wide-open and windswept as the area’s landscape. Sometimes it’s seen in bright sunlight and other times in utter darkness. The daylight reveals all the broken-down cars and abandoned homes that dot the area and wordlessly underscore the dashed dreams and ambitions of its remaining residents.
Tabatha’s tribe is predominantly female, apart from the teenage boys she “adopts” and her boyfriend Clay. One sequence shows Tabatha and her mother joining in a firepit confessional “support group” of old friends and neighbors that gives voice to the toughness of the women’s lives. Other shots show the younger girls riding fluidly and fearlessly across the open terrain. East of Wall tells a modest story about the daily lives of modern-day horsewomen of the American West.
Filmed with a constantly roving camera, the film seems somewhat impressionistic. However, as the focus roams from character to character it is not always clear who is speaking. The sheer number of teens inhabiting the ranch also interferes with our ability to distinguish among them. An occasional voiceover delivered by Porshia tells the geological history of the Badlands and the Black Hills and is warmly reminiscent of the voiceover in another poetic tale from the American plains, Days of Heaven.
As a first-time feature filmmaker, Beecroft’s storytelling technique could stand greater development, but her sense of place and mood is spot-on. Her film will definitely make you want to scrape the mud off your boots before you leave the theatre.
A version of this review previously ran during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
This article appears in August 15 • 2025.
