"Arpa" means "grab", "Colla" means "put together" and "Arpa-Colla" in modern Greek means: grabbing anything that comes to hand and putting it together haphazardly, or doing a job hastily and irresponsibly in order to make a fast buck, as is often the case in the film industry. After losing quite a lot of money on unpopular films, two young directors find themselves obliged to work on commercials. But they always hope to go back to real film-making. They visit producers or try to persuade rich friends to invest money in their talents. Although they face the same problems, the two friends have different aspirations: one is a conformist, voting for the socialists (now in power in Greece) while the other is a radical, voting for the communists. The first wants to make conventional films while the second dreams of politically committed films.
ARPA-COLLA, is the visualisation of their common unrealised projects. A surrealistic amalgam of fragments deliberately recalling well-known film genres: it starts as a romantic melodrama, turns to ideological neorealistic drama, and after a cosmopolitan intermezzo, develops into a transvestite farce on a feministic subject. Then it suddenly becomes a modern epic, changing in the middle of a long one-shot sequence into a Greek western.
A psychopathological family drama emerges, just before the film plunges deep into the violent nocturnal world of second-rate, suburban Mad Max scenes. Thematically, this imaginary film- within-a-film starts from the theme "rich-boy-meets-poor-girl", faces the problem of unemployment, makes a flash-back to narrate a new version of Sophocles' "Antigone" set against the background of the Greek civil war in the late 40s and ...well, there's no way to summarise a script as inventive and original as this.
After all, ARPA-COLLA is not an ordinary film with a real "story". It is a comedy about the way films are made and the way they reproduce reality by transforming it, although there are times when it is reality that imitates art.