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 ...

Sundance project: Gates is the writer and director of “Atropia,” starring Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Chloë Sevigny and Tim Heidecker. The movie, which is produced by Luca Guadagnino, is a feature ...

There is no need to imagine. It is hard to believe that the world of facsimiles that Hailey Gates builds is not a product of pure fiction. “Atropia” was originally proposed as a documentary to ...

Director Hailey Gates (debut) travels back to 2006 to explore Atropia through the eyes of aspiring actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat, “The Final Girls”). Based on a real military simulation town, Medina ...

An absurdist glimpse at workaday life within one of the very real, very strange U.S. military training grounds where role-players simulate foreign battlegrounds in order to prepare our troops for ...

Hailey Gates’ ambitious debut feature Atropia is full of comic potential that is never quite realised. The mixture of war games satire, deadpan farce and sweet romance provides amusement along ...