East of Wall

The New West – under its festival title East of Wall – arrives as one of the most striking portraits of contemporary America in recent memory, a work that reimagines the western not as a genre of gunfighters and outlaws but as a living chronicle of grief, resilience, and the fragile communities built in the margins. Directed by Kate Beecroft, the film is anchored by the extraordinary presence of Tabatha Zimiga and her daughter Porshia Tabatha Zimiga, both playing versions of themselves, and both turning their own lived reality into something that is at once cinematic and unflinchingly authentic.

The film opens with an image that feels like a classic western tableau: Porshia Tabatha Zimiga thundering across the Badlands at breakneck speed, her horse and body moving as one against the horizon. It is exhilarating, a moment of pure freedom, until the frame reveals itself as a TikTok video. This juxtaposition – myth and modernity colliding in the palm of a smartphone – sets the tone for a story where the American frontier is no longer a place of conquest, but a space where survival itself is the daily battle. For the Tabatha Zimiga family, survival means selling horses at undercut prices, training them with skill few in the region can rival, and keeping their sprawling 3,000-acre ranch afloat despite the crushing realities of debt and absence.

At the center stands Tabatha Zimiga, a figure as unforgettable as any conjured by a Hollywood screenwriter. Tattoos snake across her neck and arms, her hair half shaved, her eyes ringed in black liner. She looks like someone you wouldn’t want to cross in a bar, yet Kate Beecroft captures her tenderness: a woman broken by loss, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her means, and offering shelter to every wayward child who finds their way to her door. In the film, as in life, she is reeling from the death of her husband John, a tragedy that has left her estranged from Porshia Tabatha Zimiga, who struggles to reconcile grief with resentment. The horses they train become not just a livelihood, but an unspoken language between them, a means of communication where words fail.

Into this fragile ecosystem enters Scoot McNairy as Roy Waters, a Texas rancher with money, charm, and his own wounds. In a lesser film, he would be a villain in a cowboy hat, scheming to take over the land. Here, Kate Beecroft refuses such simplicity. Roy is both benefactor and threat, offering stability while quietly undermining the family’s autonomy. His presence draws out the unease of modern gentrification: what does it mean to sell your land, your history, even if it means saving the mouths you feed? His partnership with Porshia Tabatha Zimiga, taking her to auctions where her dazzling horsemanship fetches higher bids, promises escape yet risks hollowing out the very soul of the ranch.

The film’s emotional force rests in its quieter moments. A campfire gathering where local women, including Jennifer Ehle as Tabatha’s mother Tracey, share stories of abuse, regrets, and survival feels less like scripted drama and more like collective testimony. It recalls Linda Manz’s voice in Days of Heaven, where narration blurred into poetry. Here, it is Porshia Tabatha Zimiga’s voiceovers, tender and angry by turns, that tether the film to the land itself – the Badlands becoming a character, harsh and beautiful, shaped by prehistoric seas and now by generations of broken families.

Kate Beecroft’s journey to this story is itself a kind of folk tale. A road trip, a wrong turn east of a small town called Wall, and suddenly she found herself living among the Tabatha Zimigas for years, her camera not so much observing as becoming absorbed. The result is a docufiction hybrid that belongs in conversation with Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and Nomadland, but also with earlier traditions of cinéma vérité. The seams between fiction and reality are visible, yes, but rather than diminish the experience, they add to its honesty. You are never quite sure which details belong to artifice and which to lived truth – and in that ambiguity lies the film’s power.

Cinematographer Austin Shelton deserves special mention for his painterly eye. His lens captures both the grandeur of the South Dakota plains and the unvarnished grit of daily ranch life: children lying on horses’ backs scrolling through phones, mud thick on their boots, cigarette smoke curling in trailers where meals are shared like prayers. The film understands that authenticity does not come from the spectacular but from the ordinary – from seeing a young girl brush down a horse with the same devotion she might give a sibling.

If there are moments when the narrative falters – Roy’s arc sometimes feels too convenient, certain tensions are left underexplored – the sheer presence of Tabatha Zimiga and Porshia Tabatha Zimiga overrides those flaws. They are not polished performers, but that is precisely the point. Their rough edges, their silences, their unguarded expressions draw us in. Watching Tabatha Zimiga finally mount a horse again after years of self-imposed exile is more moving than any climax a screenwriter could contrive.

The New West is less about plot than about endurance – about what it means to hold on when the world keeps insisting you let go. It honors women who carry the weight of their communities, teenagers who grow up too soon, and horses whose survival is bound to human resilience. Kate Beecroft has given cinema not just a debut feature, but an initiation: into a world both foreign and achingly familiar, where family is chosen as much as it is born, and where grief is not something to overcome but something to ride through, one gallop at a time.

The New West (East of Wall)
Written and directed by Kate Beecroft
Produced by Lila Yacoub, Kate Beecroft, Melanie Ramsayer, Shannon Moss
Starring  Tabatha Zimiga, Porshia Tabatha Zimiga, Scoot McNairy, Jennifer Ehle
Cinematography : Austin Shelton
Edited by Jennifer Vecchiarello
Music by Lukas Frank, Daniel Meyer-O'Keefe
Production companies : Station Road, Stetson's Kingdom
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics (United States), 
Release dates  : January 24, 2025 (Sundance), August 15, 2025 (United States)
Running time : 97 minutes

Seen on September 6 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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