{"id":564055,"date":"2026-03-27T09:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T09:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/564055\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T09:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T09:38:07","slug":"four-wives-two-passports-and-a-very-elusive-butterfly-one-womans-search-for-her-lepidopterist-father-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/564055\/","title":{"rendered":"Four wives, two passports and a very elusive butterfly: one woman\u2019s search for her lepidopterist father | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

High in the Caucasus mountains, the photojournalist Rena Effendi<\/a> is searching for the butterfly that bears the name of the father she hardly knew. It is rocky, bleak, beautiful \u2013 and impossible. The grass is fried yellow by the increasingly fierce summer sun, the butterfly\u2019s food has been grazed by sheep and, if it exists at all, Satyrus effendi usually flies only as a single insect across a square kilometre of rock, scree and slope.<\/p>\n

A butterfly hunt makes an unlikely subject for a prize-winning documentary, but Searching for Satyrus<\/a> is a gripping quest that reveals a remarkable part of the world little known to western audiences while examining issues from war and nationalism to global heating and extinction. Ultimately, however, Effendi\u2019s search for her father\u2019s butterfly becomes a moving reckoning with the secrets and lies in her family and the life of her wayward father.<\/p>\n

\u201cSatyrus effendi is a melancholic, brooding butterfly,\u201d warns her fellow hunter, the lepidopterist Dmitrii V Morgun, one of half a dozen people on the planet who have seen this elusive, ephemeral, endangered creature. The butterfly is a perfect metaphor for Effendi\u2019s father, Rustam Effendi, a brilliant Azerbaijani butterfly scientist who was a flighty, capricious figure in Effendi\u2019s childhood.<\/p>\n

\u2018My presence is erased from his life\u2019 \u2026 photographs of Effendi\u2019s father, Rustam. Photograph: Underground Slate<\/p>\n

An \u201cincorrigible\u201d womaniser and wine lover \u2013 in the words of one of Effendi\u2019s half-sisters \u2013 Rustam was rarely at home when Effendi was growing up. He ran relationships in parallel, eventually divorced Effendi\u2019s mother and died when Effendi was 14. She remembers only women gathered around his coffin: three of his four wives, a half-sister and several other women she didn\u2019t know. At the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed and Effendi\u2019s home country, Azerbaijan, went to war with Armenia. While Donald Trump has taken the credit for a tentative peace deal<\/a>, that conflict has still not ended. Growing up, Effendi pushed memories of her difficult father from her mind until, on impulse, she searched for his name online in 2017.<\/p>\n

Reading a Wikipedia page in Russian, she discovered he had a butterfly named after him. Satyrus effendi was critically endangered and flew only in the mountainous borderlands between Azerbaijan and Armenia<\/a>. \u201cI thought: what a story \u2013 that this butterfly had to be there and nowhere else. And it carries my father\u2019s name and it carries my name,\u201d she says now on a video call from her home in Istanbul.<\/p>\n

When another phase of the unending war saw Azerbaijan recapture these borderlands, it became possible for Effendi to retrace her father\u2019s footsteps from the country\u2019s capital, Baku, to the mountains where he found the butterfly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Watch a trailer for the film.<\/p>\n

The film unfurls much as Effendi\u2019s quest did. She begins at the underfunded Institute of Zoology, where she discovers that the rare butterflies painstakingly collected by her father during decades of research and adventures are decaying \u2013 literally turning to dust.<\/p>\n

Free movement was possible for her father in Soviet days, but is less easy for Effendi. She eventually obtains special permission to enter Armenia. \u201cAfter about an hour of questioning and the bewildered policeman asking: \u2018What are you doing here?\u2019 \u2013 \u2018I\u2019m here to hunt for this rare species of butterfly,\u2019 sounded like a perfect spy cover story \u2013 they let me in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Her search for the butterfly is rooted in a quest to discover who her father really was. Her memories of him are fragments \u2013 appearing at home and then disappearing again on butterfly-hunting missions. \u201cHe had an almost ghostly presence in my life,\u201d she says. \u201cI would find jars with insects inside and his negatives in the wardrobe \u2013 vestiges of his life \u2013 around the house. One of the reasons for me to delve into this film was he had a full life outsideour home. And I wanted to paint that picture of him in more vivid colours, but I couldn\u2019t find those colours in my own history.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she became a photojournalist, she spotted the parallels between her career and his. \u201cThere is the hunt, its solitary nature, all the wandering and waiting until the moment comes and then you have to act fast, with a net or with a camera. It\u2019s almost identical. Every butterfly comes with a story; every picture comes with a story. He collected thousands of butterflies; I have thousands of pictures in my archive. Pinning down a butterfly is like pinning down a moment. Even those tiny labels that he wrote [under pinned butterflies] \u2013 I see them as captions to my photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markI wanted to paint a picture of him in more vivid colours, but I couldn\u2019t find those colours in my own history<\/p>\n

On her visit to Armenia, Effendi\u2019s best find is an old lepidopterist friend of her father, Pavlik Kazaryan, an ethnic Armenian Baku native who became a refugee during the conflict and moved to Armenia. They head into the mountains to hunt for her father\u2019s butterfly, armed with a net that Kazaryan reveals was made to Rustam\u2019s design, based on a bra. Rustam \u201cmultiplied beauty\u201d by having three daughters, Kazaryan says. But Effendi is called \u201clittle Effendi invisible girl, just like a butterfly\u201d because, Kazaryan says, his mentor never spoke of her. \u201cHe was like a father to me, a good one,\u201d he tells Effendi.<\/p>\n

Why wasn\u2019t he more of a father to her? Why was she invisible? Her butterfly quest becomes a search for family secrets and Effendi is torn between her roles as subject and journalist. The story gets richer for the audience, but more painful for her. One of her half-sisters shares the letters Rustam wrote to her mother. It was difficult reading them, says Effendi, because her own mother never received such letters and \u201cmy presence is erased from his life\u201d in them. But the letters were wonderful, romantic evocations of his butterflying adventures \u2013 of alpine meadows, waterfalls and \u201cpoppies the size of teacups\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could hear his voice for the first time. It was almost like being inside his mind for a second,\u201d says Effendi. \u201cAnd I craved that communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracking down other friends and relatives, she is told that her father kept two passports, the implication being that it enabled bigamy. But Effendi doubts that a two-passport existence was possible in Soviet Russia. \u201cJust like that butterfly is mythological and people refuse to believe it exists because it\u2019s flying over the war border, my father\u2019s life was also mythological,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

A still from Searching for Satyrus. Photograph: Underground Slate<\/p>\n

With Effendi\u2019s questions growing about her parents\u2019 relationship, she circles back to her mother, who has been \u201calways very evasive\u201d when questioned about Effendi\u2019s childhood. In a stark scene, we see Effendi shifting between her roles as journalist and daughter. On film, she says that she is entitled to the truth. Today, though, she says: \u201cIt was the camera\u2019s power that really helped that along.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you put someone in the spotlight of a camera, it holds you responsible for telling the truth. The dynamic changes. It wasn\u2019t \u2018I\u2019m the daughter and she\u2019s my mother\u2019. It was more \u2018I\u2019m an investigator and she\u2019s my subject\u2019. It\u2019s almost cruel, but that\u2019s what the camera does. In the end, she had to open up.\u201d Her mother\u2019s revelation turns Effendi\u2019s understanding of her childhood on its head.<\/p>\n

The film also tells powerful stories about global heating and extinction, as well as war and borders. As she tries to find Satyrus effendi, she learns that hotter summers are forcing shepherds to take their sheep higher into the mountains to find green grass, where they eat the high-altitude plant that the butterfly\u2019s caterpillars feed on.<\/p>\n

Effendi extended filming for another year to continue the hunt. \u201cI became obsessed with finding it,\u201d she says. \u201cI dreamed about it.\u201d She and Morgun camped for five days at high altitude, but were dogged by rain and wind. Yet, for all their struggles, the butterfly hunting offers hope that Armenians and Azerbaijanis can find peace alongside each other. \u201cHe flies above everything,\u201d says Morgun. \u201cFor him, there are no borders, no wars, nothing. Just his mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Searching for Satyrus<\/a> is in UK cinemas from 27 April. Rena Effendi will take part in Q&As after special preview screenings<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"High in the Caucasus mountains, the photojournalist Rena Effendi is searching for the butterfly that bears the name…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-564055","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}