In my experience, small film festivals geographically far-removed from the US often offer the most thoughtful curation of its cinema. With little, or even zero, pressure to cater to American studios and distributors, their programs function as a more adventurous barometer of the state of the nation than whatever Hollywood deems important enough to share with the public. I approached covering this year’s edition of the Paris-based documentary festival, Cinéma du Réel, with this in mind, excited for and open to unknown gems within its lineup of daring nonfiction cinema. My greatest personal discovery was the feature debut of Armand Tufenkian, In The Manner of Smoke (2025), a hybrid docufiction of sorts about the narrator’s experience working as a fire lookout in the forests of Central California, near Fresno. Born to Armenian parents in 1988, Tufenkian completed his undergraduate studies at Colby College, his doctoral studies at Duke, and earned a degree in Film and Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts. “One of my teachers had this idea of living your life through cinema, and that really resonated with me,” Tufenkian told me over lunch in Brooklyn in late August. This philosophy of filmmaking—not merely intellectual and emotional, but participatory and immersive—has guided his career from the beginning.