"When the film "Atropia" starts, it seems like a standard war movie set in Iraq, circa 2007. But pretty soon, you learn it's a comedy, and it's not Iraq at all. It takes place closer to Burbank than Baghdad. You see, for training purposes, the U.S. military has built these massive simulations of the countries where it's at war, so new troops can run war games and get familiar with this fake version of the terrain and the people."
"And that's where we meet Fayruz, played by Alia Shawkat. ALIA SHAWKAT: She is an actress, and she takes her job very seriously. She is Iraqi, but she's American. She works there to play one of the Iraqi civilians during war to help make it as realistic as possible. But she takes her job just a little more seriously than everybody else."
Atropia is a dark comedy set in a massive U.S. military training simulation that mimics foreign warzones near Hollywood. The simulation spans hundreds of thousands of acres in the California desert and uses actors and recreated environments to train troops. Fayruz, portrayed by Alia Shawkat, is an Iraqi-American actress hired to play a civilian role in the exercises and she approaches the part with intense seriousness and desperation. Scenes blend satire and realism, featuring characters like a casting director offering a 'mustard gas chemist' role and Fayruz worrying about being stuck in a bomb-making room while her future slips away.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]