By Gwen C. Katz
When I was a teenager, the hot thing in books was sisterhood. There was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. There was The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Senior year, my friends decided to form our own sisterhood.
Problems immediately presented themselves. Unlike in books, where sisterhoods are clear-edged and intimately small, my friend group was large, amorphous, and borderless. Not everyone was equally close with everyone else, and any cutoff point we chose would exclude someone who had just as much right to be there. And the annual meetup that would take place for the rest of our lives? The inaugural one was the only one that ever happened.
I was nagged by guilt. But the truth is, it wasn’t my friend group that had failed to live up to the sisterhoods in books. It was the books that had failed us. We’d gone off to college, met new people, learned new ideas, and come back as different people who no longer fit into the restrictive shape of friendship that we’d drawn for ourselves. The discrete, eternal sisterhood was a false ideal all along.
In today’s novels, sisterhoods have been replaced by found families, a more gender-diverse version of the same idea. These too are clear-edged and eternal, and “we’re a family now” is often overtly stated in the text. Everyone is equally intimate, no one does anything problematic (unless there’s a team Judas), and any conflict in the group is resolved through trauma-aware conversations using I-language and considering the other person’s perspective. They do not resemble any group of friends I’ve ever been part of.
Found families really do exist, but they look different than the idealized archetype from books. So where can we turn if we don’t fit that mold?
Let me introduce you to Tabatha Zimiga.
Tabatha is the star of 2025’s Sundance NEXT winner, East of Wall. Tabatha owns a ranch in South Dakota, where she rehabilitates horses everyone else has given up on. Tabatha’s life is messy, but it’s a familiar shape of messy: She has two teenagers from teen pregnancies and a toddler from a husband lost to suicide, and she now lives with a new boyfriend. Four other teens, whose parents Tabatha says “either just don’t give a fuck or can’t afford them,” also live on the ranch. Some are white; others are Native American. Her mom also lives with them. Rounding out the posse are some cats, a snake, a couple of dogs, and of course, lots and lots of horses.
Debut director Kate Beecroft, who was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about her film, was inspired by this New West and the active role that women play in it. “When I’m at a rodeo…I’m thinking, wow, the women are really the ones in charge here. And I wasn’t seeing that in a Western,” she says.
It’s easy to romanticize the kids’ lives, doing barrel racing and trick riding against the omnipresent background of the stark, gorgeous badlands. The star of the show is Tabatha’s daughter Porshia, who wins rodeos in a half-shaved “warrior cut,” which her mother also sports.
But their lives are rough. They live in unromantic poverty in a cluttered mobile home, seven kids cramming all the available space in a single bedroom. Tabatha sends Porshia into the grocery store for her to avoid being accosted over their unpaid tab, a humiliation that Porshia bristles at. There are generational cycles of trauma at work here. “My daughter’s been ruined by many,” says Tabatha’s mom, who admits to hitting her as a kid. “I’d count myself on that shitlist.” And, despite all their love and community, the trauma will probably continue.
For the most part, the Zimiga clan lives outside the fringes of government bureaucracy, but where it shows up, the institutions that should protect them instead multiply the harm. Tabatha petitions to adopt one of the teens, whose father is in jail, but is rejected by the court due to financial insecurity, a major blow. As another teen puts it, it’s about “knowing you belong somewhere, even if it just says it on a stupid piece of paper.” The toddler, Stetson, is nonverbal, but a trip to a patronizing speech therapist only ends in frustration when she refuses to understand their nontraditional family. “They’re all buffoons there,” says Tabatha’s mom, summing up their whole experience with outsiders in official positions.
Over everything looms the memory of John, Tabatha’s husband, who committed suicide a year ago. John was the consummate cowboy and surrogate father to the kids. “He taught me to ride. I mean really ride,” says Porshia. Life with John wasn’t purely idyllic—he and Tabatha fought constantly—but he was the heart of the group. “John could see things in people before they could see it in themselves,” says Tabatha’s mom. “It was just this ghost outside,” says Beecroft. “You feel John everywhere and he’s just a part of everyone’s story in that family.” Tabatha’s new boyfriend, the kind, mild-mannered Clay, attempts to take on John’s role, but can’t fill the void.
The trauma backstory is a standard part of found family stories, but its depiction in East of Wall is striking. This is no therapy-informed journey of healing, but a jagged-edged wound that harms everyone. Porshia blames Tabatha. Tabatha refuses to say his name. An attempt by Porshia to broach the topic devolves into a screaming match. When the speech therapist asks if Stetson has experienced any traumatic events that might have triggered his condition, Tabatha vaguely talks around the obvious answer. When, near the end of the film, she finally has the courage to talk about what happened, she admits, “I just fucking hate him for making me feel this way all the time every day.” There’s eventual catharsis, but while it offers a path forward, it doesn’t erase the loss. John’s death will follow them for the rest of their lives.
And yet their story isn’t a downer at all. The love and care shines through, and their perseverance in finding joy despite everything turns it into a story of quiet triumph. “They have so much beauty and laughter in their life,” says Beecroft. “I didn’t want to focus on the darkness. I also wanted to focus on the light.”
East of Wall rings true where other found family stories don’t. As well it should, because Tabatha Zimiga is real.
The story is fictional and a few minor alterations have been made (some name changes, Jennifer Ehle playing Tabatha’s mom), but Tabatha and the kids all play themselves, the horses are their real horses, and the ranch is their real ranch.
It shows in the friction and imperfections. It shows in Tabatha, who, with her side cut, kohl-rimmed eyes, and cigarettes, is far from the Mary Poppins archetype. She can be harsh and short-tempered with the kids, as you’d expect from someone who’s grieving a recent loss, trying to stave off financial disaster, and raising half a dozen teenagers all at the same time. Yet under the gruff exterior is a kind heart that sees the value in people and animals everyone else has given up on and moves heaven and earth to become what they need. The kids sense that and gravitate into her orbit. “They’re not living on this ranch because you have money,” says Clay. “They’re living here because of you.” Herself pregnant at 14, she now strives to be the role model to the kids that she never had herself.
It shows in the kids. Far from the mature, assertive miniature adults we so often see in movies, these teenagers are, first and foremost, children, crooked-toothed, elbowy, and not made up like supermodels. “The best compliment is when I have teenagers come up to me and they’re like, I’ve never seen my body on film before,” says Beecroft.
Their energy outstripping their impulse control, they abscond with Tabatha’s truck and use it to steal road cones with no plan for how they’re going to keep her from finding out. Some of the film’s most absorbing moments are scenes of the kids just goofing off, throwing water bottles at each other or jumping off horses’ backs into a pond. “Teenage girls are so feral,” says Beecroft. “They inspire so much of everything I do.” Porshia oscillates between teenage defiance and childlike passivity, talking back to her mom and Clay but unable to say no to the rich rancher who tries to buy his way into the father role.
Beecroft spent years living with the Zimiga clan and becoming part of the gang before making a movie about them. This, too, is key: It’s not just a movie about a real found family, it’s a movie within a real found family. “I ended up realizing that in order for me to be able to write about this family and write about a culture and a way of life that I didn’t grow up with, I had to become that,” says Beecroft. Writing about a found family that is, in a meaningful sense, her own, Beecroft avoids both poverty voyeurism and didactic idealization in favor of something closer to self-presentation—the group as it appears to its own members. “I don’t know how to look at them like I’m looking at subjects for a documentary,” says Beecroft. “If I’m asking them to be vulnerable, I have to be vulnerable as well.” The intimacy of this perspective lends to the realism: We believe in Tabatha because we are seeing her unfiltered. We don’t judge her for our flaws because they are our flaws—the framing implicitly assumes that of course you understand money pressures, of course you have friction within your family, of course you are hurting and you don’t want to talk about it.
And Beecroft is part of the found family now too, Hollywood mingling with cowboy culture. They taught her to do flips off a saddle; she’s working on lining up more film roles for Tabatha and Porshia. And they provided her a support network when her hometown of Altadena burned down just weeks before the film premiered at Sundance 2025.
Marinating as we are in media full of shallow simulacra of found family, seeing the real thing is stunning and refreshing. My younger self felt inadequate for not measuring up to an ideal that was always a fiction. But Tabatha shows that, in real life, you don’t need to be perfect to be what your found family needs. Maybe, just like the teenagers of East of Wall, Tabatha Zimiga is exactly what teenage me needed.
Gwen C. Katz is an author, artist, and game designer surviving the aftermath of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA. When she’s not writing, she’s usually working on her upcoming detective puzzle game, Deductopia.