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 ...

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 ...

He challenged her to write the script for “Atropia” in only four weeks. “It was my most romantic writing experience because I was writing directly toward him,” she recalled. Gates and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sundance: Directed by "Challengers" actress Hailey Gates, "Atropia" gives the War on Terror it's own take on "The Truman Show." Case in point: One early sequence in ...

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 ...