This is the official image from “Atropia,” courtesy of the Sundance Institute. “Atropia” is almost too real to be called a satire. The film centers on Atropia, a fake city built outside of Los Angeles ...

Reality blurs with performance and even love is just another scripted role in the big Sundance winner of 2025, 'Atropia.' ...

Welcome to Atropia: an invented city constructed to exercise Western imaginations and soldiers.This mirage of a place is a bizarre, liminal construction of writer-director Hailey Gates ...

Actress and journalist Hailey Gates makes her feature debut as a writer-director with the satirical Atropia, an unfunny ...

Among the many films at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, there was one title on everyone’s lips: “Atropia.” Winner of the U.S ...

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 ...

Of course, Atropia is meant to be even more immersive than a film set (the props department is proud of their pungency, which includes the ability to create the smell of burning flesh), but Gates ...

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 ...