"Atropia" premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film reviews and critical thoughts?

“Atropia” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts?

Sundance Comedy ‘Atropia’ is One of the Craziest True Stories You’ve Never Heard Hailey Gates' feature directorial debut is a messy, sexy satire based on an insane (and authentic) military ...

‘Atropia’ Review: Alia Shawkat Trains Troops Assigned to a Fake Iraqi Town in a Self-Reflexive War Comedy That Peters Out Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival on Jan 26, 2025.

“Atropia” is a story driven by its characters, who are blindly pushed to support a war that they don’t understand in the name of patriotism. Beyond somehow protecting U.S. citizens, nobody in Atropia ...

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 ...

Set in 2006, Atropia takes place at the titular U.S. military training ground in the California desert, where actors role-play as villagers in countries where the government plans to invade.

War remains one of this nation’s most profitable exports, and in Atropia, which premiered at Sundance, Gates attempts to satirize the goings-on at this role-playing facility through the eyes of ...

Based on her 2020 short “Shako Mako,” Hailey Gates writes and directs “Atropia,” a unique war satire about western views of the Middle East. While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism ...

“Atropia” never takes real shots at any of its sinister realities; it attempts to merely coast off the premise and the charm of the cast.

“Atropia” follows an aspiring actress at a military role-playing facility who falls for a soldier cast as an insurgent, their genuine emotions threatening to derail the performance.