In the Manner of Smoke (2025)
16mm and digital video, 5.1 sound, 90 minutes
In this first feature film, the Armenian filmmaker composes a flow of heterogeneous perspectives through which to observe forest fires. He gathers forms and textures without suffocating the beauty before the camera—on the contrary, he grants it time, space, and attention to breathe. He adorns nothing that calls for simplicity. The cinematic resources are used with care and affection for what is filmed; there is admiration and patience in the search for what cinema can be—as a medium between representation and experience, as a link between aesthetic experience and the question of being.
- Diana Prada Rojas, The Diffuse as Cinematic Form
Through landscapes and canvases, Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s debut feature In the Manner of Smoke traces how perception shifts over time. Moving between California’s Sequoia National Forest and painter Dan Hays' London-based studio, the film observes two solitary practices: the vigilance of a fire lookout and the meticulous rendering of digital landscapes. The camera dwells on subtle transformations, such as trees dissolving into haze, paintings oscillating between pixels and depth, and silence unfolding into sound, allowing each moment to stretch and change before our eyes. Rather than telling a linear story, the film creates a patient, immersive experience where every image feels transitory, suspended, and fleeting, like smoke carried by the wind.
- Marlene Edoyan, Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM)
In his hypnotic feature debut, filmmaker and artist Armand Yervant Tufenkian intertwines reverie and observation to explore how smoke, both as a form and a metaphor, is perceived, represented, and mediated. Through three different perspectives, that of a fire lookout in California, a contemporary post-Impressionist painter in London, and his own experience as a solitary observer, he examines how various media (writing, photography, painting, surveillance cameras) transform the perception and experience of seeing. As in painting with the sfumato technique, the multilayered, digressive narrative blurs the boundaries between form and background, subject and observer.
- Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival
Sfumato: Takes on the Poetics of Smoke (2025 - ongoing) Lecture-Performance
A lecture-performance organized around the movement of images among cinema, painting, technological observation, and live transmission. Drawing from the research surrounding In the Manner of Smoke, the work treats the lecture as a provisional exhibition form in which spoken text, projection, painting, and performance continually modify one another.
During the performance, images of wildfire, landscape, smoke, surveillance webcams, and historical paintings are brought into relation with a live camera trained on a painted surface. The developing image is projected back into the space, creating a closed circuit between gesture, surface, camera, and screen. Painting becomes both an object of attention and an event unfolding in cinematic time.
The title refers to sfumato, the painting technique through which contours dissolve into transitions of light, shadow, and air. Within the performance, sfumato also functions as a methodology: images move between media, acquire new textures and temporalities, and remain open to transformation through proximity and repetition.
Temporary Fields (2018)
Lithium Gallery, Chicago
Temporary Fields brings the single-channel film Accession into a participatory exhibition organized around the circulation of seeds, letters, images, and botanical materials. Gardeners, farmers, and seed enthusiasts encountered during the film’s production—as well as members of their extended networks—were invited to contribute seeds to a temporary site of exchange at Lithium Gallery in Chicago.
The resulting collection included photographs, correspondence, botanical specimens, and other materials accompanying the seeds. These contributions were exhibited alongside objects and documents generated through the making of Accession, placing two distinct models of collection in relation. The film follows the movement of seeds through letters and private exchanges, while the exhibition temporarily gathered these dispersed materials and participants within a shared space.
Where accessioning typically stabilizes an object within a collection, Temporary Fields approached collecting as a provisional act of convergence. The exhibition functioned as one point within a larger, living network whose seeds continued to move, adapt, and acquire meaning through cultivation and exchange. Presented during winter in Chicago, the ungrown seeds also held the possibility of future germination, further adaptation, and renewed circulation.
Accession (2018)
16mm, sound, 48 minutes
Made in collaboration with Tamer Hassan
Shooting for more than five years in 13 locations around the U.S., Tamer Hassan and Armand Yervant Tufenkian trace a collection of letters to the homes where each was sent or received in this uniquely process-based documentary. The letters, written to accompany seed packets sent between friends and families and dated as far back as 1806, are read aloud by individual narrators, unfolding as personal-poetic reflections on life and labor in rural America. Via a variety of 16mm film stocks, Accession maps a visual and aural correspondence between anonymous people and places with an exploratory flair. - Art of the Real at Lincoln Center The work is bathed in an incredibly warm and organic aura, making the cracked images appear almost untouchable, like old time worn paintings gleaming with varnish: beautifully aged shots of prairie lands and clapboard houses under drained colorless skies, close-ups of hands webbed in elegant interplays of light an dark lovingly handling seed pods, a woman sitting at a sewing machine in a shadowed room as still and quiet as a Vermeer, or a wintry dirt country ride bounded by bare trees somewhere in middle America. Filmmakers Hassan and Tufenkian have done more than just bemoan the slow fading away of a ritual — the careful and deliberate cultivation and digging of the earth — that is as old as we are, but have also contributed, by celebrating the unassuming diligence of those carrying on, their own elegiac visual love letter to the inventory. - David Perrin, MUBI Notebook Accession is the result of a centuries-long resistance: the one carried out by seed savers. The resistance comes in the shape of letters between people, letters that travel together with the seeds they share. The letters bring instructions, descriptions, intimate elements from subtle friendships and a desire for these seeds to survive the saver. We are able to see the beauty of this work — separating the seeds, preparing the soil, moving through it — and also the dark parts — having to rely on a climate that in increasingly merciless, train wagons carrying oil across the country. Accession is a film that affirms without words that poetry is a weapon loaded with the future. - Lucia Salas, Mar del Plata Film Festival ... The effect is a kind of secular prayer and paean to decency and communal duty, as the diversity of the seeds and weathered film stocks feed a soulful sense of continuity that stretches from the 1800s up to now... - Nicolas Rapold, Viennale
First Inquiries on Community (2017)
16mm, silent, 9 min
A double-exposure dance, delving into the everyday movements of community; experimental scoring in relation to improvisation and composition in the moving-image. Bodily coordinates of a spectrum.
“You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self...” Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
in lightning Agnes (2014)
handmade-emulsion on 16mm celluloid, silent, 2 min
Expanding what it means to make a place-based film by incorporating the physical environment into the very material of the image; "in a real, material sense, what is made from where." (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts) In 2014, Armand Tufenkian and collaborators Robert Schaller and Curt Heiner made a film in the Zirkel Wilderness area of Colorado. It briefly chronicles a climb of Mount Agnes, using a handmade photographic emulsion that was prepared on site at 10,000 feet, using water from a nearby glacier and a large fire. The emulsion was prepared and coated onto celluloid at night during an early August new moon (because, while the moon would have exposed the film, the stars do not). The film was then rolled up before dawn during a lightning storm, shot during the day under the threat of more lightning, and processed on location that night.