How a First-Time Filmmaker Found Her Muse, Best Friend, and Rising TikTok Star in the Middle of Nowhere
When the first audience to see Kate Beecroft’s feature directorial debut, “East of Wall,” files into its Friday morning premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, they won’t be the only ones seeing it for the first time. Its own stars, including Tabatha Zimiga and her daughter Porshia Zimiga, have yet to view the film. After all, they lived it, sort of.
“I thought about this long and hard,” Beecroft told IndieWire. “If I was going to show it to them at home? South Dakota is like, you walk in the door and no one says hi to you, you don’t want to show emotion. No hugs, nothing. I’ve changed that in them. I’m always like, ‘Get up and hug me.’ But I don’t think it would have that support that Sundance carries, and I think what Tabby and these kids need is to know how amazing they are, because they have no idea. To have an audience of strangers connecting with their story is going to make them feel like it’s all worth it.”
More from IndieWire
In her first interview in advance of the film’s premiere, Beecroft admitted to being a bit “scatterbrained” — and not just because of the nerves associated with bringing her film, a fictional feature with lots of real elements into the world, but because of the real world itself.
“I’m a little scatterbrained because we just moved into our house last night,” Beecroft told IndieWire last week. “And it’s just been really intense, because we live in Eaton Canyon, Altadena. And my husband is a firefighter, he saved our home.” When I paused to ask, per my transcript, a quite overwhelmed, “Oh, my God! Are you OK? Do you want to do this now?,” Beecroft was resolute.
“No, I do, because this is important,” she said. “I told my husband, ‘I have to do this, because I have to do it for Porshia.’ I’ll do anything for that girl. I have to do as much as I can to get butts in seats for her.”
Getting butts in seats for “East of Wall” won’t be hard, especially after people hear the absolutely insane story that led to its creation, a years-long epic journey that didn’t just turn Beecroft into a filmmaker, Tabby and Porshia into movie stars, and the entire Zimiga family into a surrogate one for Beecroft. The film, a blend of everything from “The Rider” to “The Wolfpack,” filtered through a distinctly Malick-influenced lens, is poised to be one of the great discoveries of this year’s festival.
In the film, Tabatha and Porshia play versions of themselves, but while the film is based on much of their lives in a far-flung South Dakota ranch where they raise horses, take in anyone needing a home and a hot meal, and basically living life very much their own way, it is a narrative, not a documentary. But the sense of realism pervades it, not just on the screen, but off, where Beecroft is excited for Sundance, not just for the film, but so she can be reunited with the Zimiga clan.
So, how did this start? It’s easy enough to get the ball rolling with the effusive Beecroft. “It is absolutely insane, and I look back on it, and I’m not a religious person, but it was just something was moving me, how everything slotted into place,” she said.
Beecroft’s background is in acting, and she trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. While she always had a love for storytelling, Beecroft said, that often meant she was encouraged to go in front of the camera. “When you’re a cute little girl, people tell you, ‘Oh, you like storytelling? You should be an actress,’” she said. “I never even thought I should be a director, I didn’t even know that was possible for me.”
But when she got to drama school, she couldn’t help approaching the work with a director’s eye. Mostly, she was in awe of all the other talent around her. “I was dreaming up roles for these amazing actors in my class, and that’s kind of what got me into directing, is finding people and faces and souls and stories that I was just like, ‘Oh God, I want to see you. I don’t want to see another blah, blah, blah film. You’re more interesting.’”
In 2019, she and her DP Austin Shelton hit the road to find those kinds of people and faces and souls and stories. She’s been all around America before, but never in this kind of road trip style, living out of her truck, and going through Colorado, Nebraska, and ending up in South Dakota.
“It was like a 116 degree heat wave the whole time we were there, but the lighting was amazing,” she said. “I was just like, wherever we are, let’s stay here, because the light’s so good.”
One day, she said, they went looking for coffee. “We took a turn onto a road and there was this tiny town called Oelrichs, and there were a bunch of these amazing ranchers, some were Native Americans, some were white. They had the most amazing faces, and Austin wanted to film them, but I was so fascinated by the woman who was cooking for all of them. I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to film them. I want to spend the day filming this woman.’”
After they left, the woman’s daughter called Beecroft, with a thank you and one hell of a tip. “She said, ‘Thank you for filming my mother. As a woman in this community, she’s never seen, and it was the first time she felt seen,’” Beecroft recalled. “And she’s like, ‘But if you want a really amazing story, get off at this exit, east of [the town of] Wall, and there’s a woman named Tabatha waiting for you.’”
As Beecroft tells it, there are no addresses in South Dakota, it’s just exit signs. “So we turned on this exit, and we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, and it was just this crazy ranch,” she said. “Because certain parts of Wall look nice, but then where she is, I think that’s also why she’s not accepted in the community of Wall, which I don’t really talk about too much in the film, but she’s not accepted there. She’s really the outcast and there are a lot of conspiracy theories about her. She’s kind of this myth in this town, they’re like, ‘Oh, Tabby. She’s like the witch who lives on the mountain.’”
But Beecroft didn’t know that yet. She just saw the ranch, a bunch of cool-looking teenagers, scowling tweens, horses, babies, trailers, and Tabby. “The trailer is lifted, so they’re literally looking down at me, and then Tabby said, ‘So you’re here to see some real cowgirl shit?,’” she said.
She said yes. “I am shaking, because they’re so intimidating,” the filmmaker said. “Immediately, she’s like, ‘Girls, go get the horses,’ and they literally hop on a horse with no saddle, completely bareback. They’re flinging themselves up and over, their heads are all half-shaved, they’re so cool. I spent five days with them, sleeping on their floor. Austin and I were just like, ‘We can’t leave. This is too good.’”
Beecroft initially thought Tabby and the kids and the ranch would make for a cool short or even a music video. “And then Austin’s like, ‘Kate, no, this is a feature,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I’m not ready to do a feature,’” she said. “And then I was like, ‘Well, this has all come to me. Let’s see where this can go.’”
For five years, Beecroft kept returning to the ranch, living there three weeks out of every month. What was she expecting? She wanted to craft a story, she said, and she wanted to see if Tabby and Porshia could tell it. “Really, what I was doing was just talking to them all the time, and having them tell me their stories,” she said. “So, in a way, it was kind of like an audition. If you can tell me a story and keep me into that story, then you have something that could be held on screen. And they all did.”
What were they expecting? Beecroft laughed “It’s funny, because Tabby, she’s my best friend, I speak to her every single day, and we laugh about it all the time,” she said. “She’s like, ‘For the first few months, we just thought you were absolutely insane, and we all thought you’d fizzle out, but you kept coming back. And that’s when we started to love you.’ A lot of people are like, ‘How did you even get into a community like that?’ I’m like, ‘They tested me.’ They were testing me. They were doing really hardcore things in front of me to see if I would falter, if I would be scared, and I knew that. Was I scared at times? Absolutely.”
The scariest thing, Beecroft said, was hoping they would accept her, that they would trust her, even love her. That they’d let her in. “They didn’t really understand what I was doing, but they trusted me anyway, and I think that’s the crazy thing about it all,” she said. “It was just like an instinctual thing.”
“I don’t think I could do a doc about them,” Beecroft said. “It would have to be another director. I don’t think I could, because I know how talented they are as artists. Porshia is an artist through and through. She’s one of the best, she can draw like no other. Tabby can tell stories for days. Their whole life is artistic. If they were in LA, everyone would think they’re artists, but they’re not. [In South Dakota], they’re just weirdos.”
And while much of the story that holds “East of Wall” together — Tabby’s children, her widowhood, the horse training — is very real, the film itself is a piece of fiction. “When it is somewhat fiction, they don’t feel so naked,” the filmmaker said. “I don’t want to put these kids in a position where they feel naked. It just wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t fair for their artistry.”
To sell her vision for the film, Beecroft made a pitch trailer for interested parties. “I am a no name director, no name DP, no name cast. I had no one attached to it,” she said. “The only thing I could do, especially as a female filmmaker, especially with no name, was make the best pitch trailer possible, so I can be like, ‘Look what me and my DP can do without any crew, without any money. If you give us money, imagine what we could do with more.’”
The pitch trailer worked: she signed with the Gersh Agency for representation, and snagged Scott Frank and Lila Yacoub as producers. “When the cast saw that for the first time, I don’t think they expected it to be so beautiful,” she said. The next step: a script.
“Giving that script to Tabby was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but it was also the biggest love letter I could give to anybody,” Beecroft said. “I still have a screenshot of her response to it. She was like, ‘After reading it, I feel hope.’ Everything that she’s gone through with her kids, she’s like, ‘I can’t have it all be for nothing.’ The fact that she is taking her trauma and turning it into art is crazy. Is she so scared to premiere at Sundance and have people know her life? Yes. I can’t even imagine what she’s going through to be able to do this, but she’s so strong and she’s doing it for other women and for her kids.”
And Porshia? Beecroft laughed. “Porshia didn’t read the script,” she said. “She’s like, ‘I don’t need to read, it’s my life.’” Porshia, Beecroft said, would love to be an actress. She’s a major horror fan, and one of her first questions when she found out the film got into Sundance was the exact response you’d expect from that kind of cinephile: “Is Mia Goth going to be at Sundance?”
Tabby and Porshia are joined by handful of professional actors in the film to help further draw the line between fact and fiction. Scoot McNairy plays a rancher who turns up one day, hires Porshia to train horses, and ultimately tries to buy their ranch. “I wanted this kind of white male energy, who is so out of touch,” she said. “People would want that role as an actor, it’s a fine role.” (Like much in the film, McNairy’s storyline isn’t exactly real, but it’s certainly true.)
A nearly unrecognizable Jennifer Ehle plays Tabby’s mother, Tracey. “For whoever was going to play Tracey, I was like, ‘They have to be the bravest person to play that role,’” Beecroft said. Initially she wanted to cast the real Tracey, but Ehle slips right into the role, down to exact replicas of stuff Tracey wears to this day.
“Jennifer embraced it. She wanted to get into the space so badly,” the filmmaker said. “She wanted to be around Tabby and get as much of this energy as she could. We had her hang out in Tracey’s trailer, like her trailer home, so she could really see how this Tracey lives. We would go to rodeos, we’d go to bars, and everyone was like, ‘Hey, Tracey!,’ giving Jennifer Ehle hugs, all these people. I know it was a hard role for Jennifer to do. It’s so out of anyone’s comfort zone. I think a lot of people had culture shock, especially Jennifer, but she came at it with so much compassion and she loved these women. What you see in Jennifer, it’s exactly how the real Tracey is.”
That Tabatha would prove to be such a formidable on-screen presence isn’t a total shock. She’s long been using social media to sell her horses, care of TikTok and her “even more crazy Snapchat.”
“Her whole thing is, she’ll always take a pretty horse,” Beecroft said. “She’ll take these gorgeous horses, even though they’re so naughty, and she’ll be like, ‘Let’s have fun.’ Tabby just loves making things look badass. She loves to edit her stories, and she’s a director in her own sense. She’s good with TikTok, and that’s how she sells her horses. I think she understands the market of making things cinematic, and that would potentially sell horses. It’s like, ‘You want that horse that’s in that movie?’ So she’s trying to be like, ‘You want that horse that’s in this TikTok?’”
Often, Beecroft said, Tabby would help her and Shelton nail the best shot for a horse, or a rider, or the landscape. She naturally gravitates to things that look both beautiful and badass.
“She has her camera at all times, her whole life is recorded and documented just in case some horse does something crazy,” Beecroft said. “She dropped out of high school when she was 14 because she got pregnant with her son. She’s the smartest woman I know. It’s one of those things that I am constantly just like, ‘God, why did I have my upbringing and why did Tabby have hers? And what could she have been if she had my upbringing?’ It’s a crazy feeling. And I talked to her about that, and I asked her what she thought, and she was like, ‘I’d be a director.’ And I’m like, ‘I know.’”
“East of Wall” will premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. UTA Independent Film Group helped raise financing and is representing worldwide rights for the film.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
