TIME TRAVELING THROUGH TIME | Omeleto

A wannabe director battles the laws of time and space when he copies a famous film.
TIME TRAVELING THROUGH TIME is used with permission from Ryan Ward. Learn more at memorypillfilms.com.
An aspiring film auteur sets off to make a time travel movie, taking the seminal French film LA JETEE as his inspiration. While making it, he struggles with translating his vision to screen, all while trying to impress and maybe even seduce his actress, who often questions him and his decisions.
But the project goes awry when the director gets caught up in a time travel loop himself, with each riff adding more complications to the story. Eventually, the story itself takes over, as the director finds himself at the mercy of his creation.
Directed and written by Ryan Ward, this sci-fi comedy begins with a brief but campily operatic intro leading into the first part of the filmmaker's opus, revealing how the narrative takes the influential film LA JETEE, directed by Chris Marker, as its jumping-off point. LA JETEE told a story about doomed infatuation and time travel using ominous still photographs and voiceover narrative. This film takes that original format style as its inspiration as well, both for the director's work and the meta-level observing the aspiring director. The storytelling, though, has a certain sly mischief and goofiness, which seeps through the artsy stylings and then dismantles them with great wit.
The director's film is a murky, not very original riff on LA JETEE, but the meta-story follows the director's efforts not just to make the film but also to bed the lead actress by impressing her with his artistic genius. Needless to say, things don't go well, but they go especially sideways when the director finds himself in his own temporal aberration, wondering if the actress and his film were an alternate dimension. Suddenly, the director becomes the star of his work and story, stuck in a loop he must get out of if he wants to complete his masterpiece.
Like the images of LA JETEE, this film's photos are striking and evocative, as are the faces of actors Skylar Caleb and Dru Perez, as well as the soundscape and musical score underneath the pictures. The real cleverness lies in the writing, which has a fun time with the complications of the time-travel genre and the egotism behind the hubris of filmmaking. As the various time travels converge, so do the different egos and agendas, making for an eccentric and hilarious conclusion.
Smart, wry and ultimately delightful to watch, the end of TIME TRAVELING THROUGH TIME is almost hilariously operatic in its pile-up of characters and plot events, and though its conclusion is undoubtedly absurd, it is also oddly logical in the zany hall of mirrors that is its story. If time travel represents an obsessive series of attempts to recreate love and time travel films an exercise in inflated self-importance, this particular riff takes it all into the direction of self-love, with hijinks very gleefully ensuing.