"Atropia," a satire of the Iraq War and military contractors' efforts to prepare soldiers to fight overseas, was one of the big winners at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival's awards ceremony.

Hailey Gates’ “Atropia” and Brittany Shyne’s “Seeds” claimed the top jury awards at Sundance, along with audience favorites "Twinless,” “DJ Ahmet” and “Prime Minister.”

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 towns established by the American military for training purposes and the actors cast as townspeople — and potential terrorists — in those training scenarios.

Like many of the independent films that premiered at this muted edition of Sundance, “Atropia” has not yet sold to a distributor.

Photos from the Sundance Film Festival 2025, the premieres of 'Atropia' & 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' on Day 3.

Hailey Gates turned her Miu Miu "Women's Tales" short film into a Sundance feature, starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner.

As it searches for a new home beyond Park City, Utah, the film festival showcases a neo-western, a promising comedic debut and two unsettling documentaries.

In writer-director Hailey Gates' directorial debut 'Atropia', she dives into the Bush-era culture of toxic masculinity, nationalism and Islamophobia.

The winners of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival include Dylan O'Brien's 'Twinless,' the comedy 'Atropia' and the documentary 'Seeds.'

Audiences chose a little differently. Twinless, which stars Dylan O’Brien as a man grieving his twin brother, won the audience award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, while André Is an Idiot took it for U.S. Documentary, DJ Ahmet got it for World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and Prime Minister won in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Sundance: See the full list of competition and Audience winners out of the 2025 festival, running through February 2.