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Hailey Gates, USA 2025
Though it’s all fictitious, the narrative ATROPIA, made for the silver screen, from filmmaker Hailey Gates is based on real experiences, in a real fake place, that the US military uses to train soldiers before deployment.
Gates shares, “After 9/11, the US government hired Hollywood with lucrative contracts to construct fake Iraqi and Afghan village sets on military bases across America. The sets are then populated with civilian role-players hired to live and act in the town for weeks at a time.” Adding, “Each rotation (three weeks) cost about $20 million dollars to put on.” The US continues to use these mock areas of “Atropia,” as a support for the soldiers to build strength, comradery, and commitment to one another.
Gates wanted to make a documentary about these various sets and the impact it had on the training prior to the soldier’s deployment; but the US military denied access, as one can imagine, so Gates opted to write a screenplay of a comedic and romantic storyline set inside such a mock village. It is comedic, at times chaotic, but in all sincerity, it gives life to role-playing of a potentially serious arena of warfare.
Gates’s satire uses the idea from the likes of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, to express the dangers people work under while bravery allows them to release an enormous amount of tension through humor and commitment to the task at hand. Life happens and it includes romance and comedy in stressful times.
Gates’s ATROPIA develops when an aspiring actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) is hired to role-play in a military fake facility and falls in love with a soldier, Abu Dice (Callum Turner), who is cast as an insurgent. To keep their relationship secret the two much go to great lengths to not be detected. Over time it compromises their performances, and a soldier’s mission when he is deployed.
Gates concludes, “The film is many things: a love story, a satire, a commentary on the strange intersection of theater, war, and humanity but ultimately, I hope it’s a ‘movie, movie.’”
