You have to excuse most South Dakotans for having mixed feelings when Hollywood comes to town. Every decade or so, a filmmaker rolls in, falls in love with the sweeping plains, big sky, and striking natural light, and is inspired to share what they see. As a result, the South Dakota that shows up in movies is usually beautiful but shallow—set dressing for stories that could be told anywhere.
Kate Beecroft doesn’t begrudge her colleagues’ aesthetic impulses (“The light is amazing, everything is gorgeous throughout South Dakota!”) but the first time she visited, she also recognized that most out-of-state filmmakers were only skimming the surface.
She would know. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Beecroft has watched filmmakers do the same thing to her own city time and time again. “I hate when someone makes a show or movie about L.A. that does not feel like L.A. It’s what people think L.A. is meant to be,” she says. “And I think a lot of people make movies about South Dakota [that way], what they think the region is meant to feel like.”
For several seasons before writing East of Wall, Beecroft lived and worked on the ranch owned and run by the docu-drama’s protagonist, Tabatha Zimiga, and her family.
Taking the time to invest in those relationships is the reason the film succeeds in such a striking fashion. A version written as a tourist would have been fundamentally off, she says. “Emotionally, I would have gotten it wrong.” Her time on the ranch and living in the community of Wall showed her what it takes to survive in the rural Midwest: navigating weather, debt, neighbors, and relying on land you steward, but can’t control.
Beecroft’s understanding of the land and people directly influenced how she chose to use the camera, resisting the easy landscape glamour shots South Dakota is known for until they are earned by the story. For most of the film, her footage stays close, handheld, and restless, because “that is the emotional landscape of the community I was in. Overstimulating, overwhelming.”
She lived abroad for most of her twenties, making her more familiar with Europe than the Midwest until she met Zimiga’s family. But after spending three years living with the inspiration—and eventual stars—of her film, Beecroft is as protective of the state as any South Dakotan.
When asked what would have been lost if she’d chased a tax incentive to Montana or New Mexico (states that, to a general audience, might as well be South Dakota), she doesn’t know where to begin. To her, the differences are almost too vast to name. “The rodeos feel different, the sale barns feel different, the communities feel different. I mean . . . it’s everything.”
Her production assistants, her assistant director, her grips and electricians were from South Dakota. Some had never worked a film set, but they had worked cattle, which was a skill set that translated surprisingly well to film production. “There’s no one harder working than a ranch hand.”
When East of Wall screened in Rapid City, the people Beecroft had spent years with finally saw themselves and their community on screen. “People were going, ‘That’s Randy! That’s my uncle,’” she recalls.
Theaters bumped other titles to add showtimes, and strangers messaged her asking how to get tickets before the next sellout. For a director who’d been warned that South Dakotans wouldn’t turn out for a film about themselves, made by an outsider, the response settled the question.
“It’s actually just like a love letter to South Dakota,” she says. One written by someone who stayed long enough to mean it.