By Bailey Pennick

Sundance Film Festival Director Eugene Hernandez is currently talking about Atropia, the smart and stylish debut feature film of writer-director Hailey Gates, to the full house at Eccles Theatre. Gates herself, though, is standing on the side of the stage full of the nerves. As Hernandez turns to her to join him and introduce her sharp and touching satire to the world, the writer-director holds her face in her hands and says “Oh god!” before heading onto the stage. Her nerves melt into a big grin as she turns the spotlight onto her collaborators. “I just want to humiliate the amount of people who worked on this,” laughs Gates before asking her film team to stand up in the audience. Cheers fill the theater and we’re all off and running into this adventure.

It’s clear that Atropia is the work of a talented village dedicated to Gates’ unique vision from the moment it begins — a sweeping war drama set in an Iraqi village in the early 2000s quickly gives way to the smoke and mirrors of a U.S. military role-playing facility outside of Los Angeles where aspiring and working actors train soldiers in war game missions. Alia Shawkat leads the film as one of those dreamers, just hustling in “The Box” until one of her audition tapes will make it to Hollywood. Her commitment to craft and career are unmatched — and admired by her fellow faux villagers — until a forbidden love affair (Callum Turner) flips the script on her.

Gates flipped the script for this project several times before ending on an anti-war statement in the dark comedic lineage of M*A*S*H (1970) and To Be or Not to Be (1942). “At first, though, I wanted to make a documentary about these facilities,” Gates explains, after the credits roll, of her years of research on military war-game facilities. “This world was so disturbing, it was ripe for satire.” After testing the satire waters with a short film for the Miu Miu fashion brand in 2019, Gates and Shawkat — close friends and collaborators — decided to take the leap to a feature with a special request from Shawkat: add a romance plot.

“I said I’d never been in a romance,” the actor recalls. “The world doesn’t like to see me in that way for some reason, but I’d like to try.” Gates went back to the board and wrote an endearing and complex romance at the center of Atropia, which brings a higher level of stakes to the surreal true-life experience of these training soldiers.

And while it might be standard to do a couple of rewrites for your main actor, writing detailed and memorable parts for bit players and actors is something special. The filmmaker knows what it feels like to be the hustler like Shawkat’s character. “I often play small parts in movies,” Gates says. “So I wanted to make those roles memorable too.” Expanding her village through kindness and craft is at the very heart of Gates’ work — and the encouragement of the crowd saw that compassion come back around to her. “I cannot believe all these people are here to make this hairbrained idea happen,” she says with tears in her eyes.