Idle Mist VII: The Title Shot

The next scene was shot at Bellas Artes, the Caldas University's school of Music and Arts. I had played some of my scores with the chamber orchestra on one of the stages there, and had also put up some projected/live action shows at their theater. The building lies on a hilltop overlooking my neighborhood, La Francia, but what attracted me were stunning Andes mountains perfectly visible further in the distance. This would be the campus of Valeria's liberal arts college. The idea was to shoot the exterior scenes in a spot where I had often found myself reading, in a place where we could glimpse the beautiful geography of central Colombia. But since we're located close to the equator, our weather is unpredictable and it turned out to be foggy that day. So nothing was visible from my favorite spot and we wouldn't be able to return with the camera. I was dissapointed at first but soon realized it actually worked best for the mood and theme we were going for. Later on, when Tigris Films approached me about worldwide distribution for Vana Espuma, this shot inspired the English title. Vana Espuma is the original name I had also previously used for the comic book. It was the translation given to Freud's German word Schaum (froth or spume), on a Spanish version of his book On Dreams. (I think the translator was using an expresion first used by Lope de Vega on his 1612 play Fuente Ovejuna [vv.899-907]) In his introduction Freud mentioned that most of his colleagues had dismissed his pioneering work on the unconscious, claiming that dreams were "merely froth". But what if the same could be said about day to day reality? I decided to use Vana Espuma as an ironic title, because I was taking a view directly opposite to that of Freud's contemporaries. I later found out, mine was a Cartesian take on reality. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" as Shakespeare would say.

"Idle Mist" seemed an appropriate metaphor for the world in which these characters, our shadows and reflections on a stage, struggled to exert their identity, their existence even. Siddhartha Gautama, the awakened, had put it this way: "Think this about the fleeting world. A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream".