The Time Traveller’s Pantoum

In this whiteboard animation, an aging time traveller meditates upon his failures as he attempts​ ​to stop his younger time​-​travelling self from ​​seeking to make the world a better place.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Daniel Scott Tysdal

Filmmaker’s statement

The Time Traveller’s Pantoum explores the perils, struggles and hopes of an aging time traveller and, more broadly, the complicated and endless labour of anyone who strives to make the world a better place.

The poem, published in my collection Fauxccasional Poems, is written as a pantoum, a 15^th-century Malaysian poetic form that is itself a sort of time-travelling poetic form: the second and fourth line of each stanza serve as the first and third line of the next stanza. As the poem unfolds, moving forward in time, it also travels back in time through these repetitions.

This short film is part of the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project, a series of shorts that employ popular YouTube genres to adapt fauxccasional poems (poems written about speculative, fake or alternative historical events).

Other examples include a documentary on the Enola Gay’s refusal to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, an a cappella tribute to JFK, dead at the age of 92, and a collective pledge of allegiance to Isis – the goddess, that is.

About Daniel Scott Tysdal

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the ReLit award-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Fauxccasional Poems (icehouse 2015), and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press 2014).

His film and video work includes the short film Film Frame, which was an official selection for the 2017 Toronto Short Film Festival, and the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project.

He is an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Learn more about his work at danielscotttysdal.com.