It’s 2006. A veiled woman ambles through a dusty street, exchanging glances with men in keffiyehs as sinister music plays in the background. In rolls a Humvee, and out pours a team of soldiers, rushing to assess the situation. Tensions rise, one soldier points a gun at the woman, and an explosion ripples through the block. Shock, fear, shaky cameras.
The soldiers scramble, chased by insurgents shouting “Allahu akbar” and “Death to America.” The woman wails to the sky, only to be interrupted by a director’s megaphone. The donkey bomb didn’t detonate, so they’ll have to run it back from the top.
This is Atropia, a new film that’s part rom-com and part war on terror satire, an interesting take on the disconnect between Americans and the not-so-long-ago wars fought in their name. The title refers to a fake, oil-rich dictatorship constructed within a real U.S. military training facility in the California desert, where the story unfolds.
Inside the facility, actors play civilians and insurgents in an immersive simulation to prepare soldiers for deployment. Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) is an Iraqi American actor searching for her big break. As she stumbles into a romance with a recent veteran cast as an insurgent, Fayruz begins to grapple with the moral complexities of, as her coworker puts it, “helping a group of teenagers” to invade their homeland “in a gentler way.”
