So she turned the idea into an unconventional love story instead, and “Atropia” was born. The film, which premiered on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival, was originally conceived as a ...

By Lovia Gyarkye Arts & Culture Critic In Atropia, Gates, who also wrote the screenplay, includes a hampering romantic thread between our aspiring actress and a soldier cast as an Atropian ...

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, “Atropia” is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism ...

There’s an inherent farce to the U.S. government, or so Hailey Gates suggests in her debut feature film, Atropia. Based on her 2019 short film Shako Mako, Gates expands her exploration of fake towns ...

In writer-director Hailey Gates’ directorial debut Atropia, she dives into the Bush-era culture of toxic masculinity, nationalism and Islamophobia with an amusing and profoundly absurdist sense ...

Like Gates’ short, “Atropia” opens with a near-identical scene of an Iraqi woman played by Alia Shawkat, witnessing U.S. troops rolling through her hometown in pursuit of a suspect right as ...

Like many of the independent films that premiered at this muted edition of Sundance, “Atropia” has not yet sold to a distributor. By Kyle Buchanan The comedy “Atropia,” starring Alia ...

The year is 2006 and this is Atropia, a fictional country in California, used as a stand-in to train new cadets for deployment to wherever America happens to be invading (in this case, Iraq). It ...