Rena Effendi’s film Searching for Satyrus began as a quest for an endangered butterfly bearing her family name, but soon became a reckoning with secrets, lies and the mysterious life of her wayward father. High in the Caucasus mountains, the photojournalist searches for Satyrus effendi, a critically endangered insect that flies only in the mountainous borderlands between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The butterfly is a perfect metaphor for Effendi’s father, Rustam Effendi, a brilliant Azerbaijani butterfly scientist who was rarely at home during her childhood. An “incorrigible” womaniser and wine lover, he ran relationships in parallel, eventually divorced Effendi’s mother and died when she was 14. At his coffin, she remembers three of his four wives, a half-sister and several other women she did not know.
Effendi grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. She pushed memories of her difficult father from her mind until 2017, when she searched for his name online and discovered he had a butterfly named after him. Satyrus effendi is critically endangered and flies only in the disputed borderlands, which became accessible to Effendi after Azerbaijan recaptured the territory.
The film follows Effendi as she retraces her father’s footsteps from Baku to the mountains. She begins at the underfunded Institute of Zoology, where she finds his rare butterfly collection decaying. She obtains special permission to enter Armenia, where a bewildered policeman questions her butterfly-hunting mission. “After about an hour of questioning … ‘I’m here to hunt for this rare species of butterfly,’ sounded like a perfect spy cover story – they let me in,” she says.
Effendi’s search for the butterfly is rooted in a quest to discover who her father really was. She recalls his “ghostly presence” in her life, finding jars of insects and his negatives in the wardrobe. As a photojournalist, she sees parallels between their careers: “There is the hunt, its solitary nature, all the wandering and waiting … It’s almost identical.”
