Rena Effendi’s film Searching for Satyrus began with a quest for the endangered insect that bears her family name. Before long, she was reckoning with secrets, lies and the mysterious life of her wayward dad

Patrick Barkham

High in the Caucasus mountains, the photojournalist Rena Effendi is searching for the butterfly that bears the name of the father she hardly knew. It is rocky, bleak, beautiful – and impossible. The grass is fried yellow by the increasingly fierce summer sun, the butterfly’s 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.

A butterfly hunt makes an unlikely subject for a prize-winning documentary, but Searching for Satyrus 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’s search for her father’s butterfly becomes a moving reckoning with the secrets and lies in her family and the life of her wayward father.

“Satyrus effendi is a melancholic, brooding butterfly,” 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’s father, Rustam Effendi, a brilliant Azerbaijani butterfly scientist who was a flighty, capricious figure in Effendi’s childhood.

An “incorrigible” womaniser and wine lover – in the words of one of Effendi’s half-sisters – Rustam was rarely at home when Effendi was growing up. He ran relationships in parallel, eventually divorced Effendi’s 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’t know. At the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed and Effendi’s home country, Azerbaijan, went to war with Armenia. While Donald Trump has taken the credit for a tentative peace deal, 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.

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. “I thought: what a story – that this butterfly had to be there and nowhere else. And it carries my father’s name and it carries my name,” she says now on a video call from her home in Istanbul.

When another phase of the unending war saw Azerbaijan recapture these borderlands, it became possible for Effendi to retrace her father’s footsteps from the country’s capital, Baku, to the mountains where he found the butterfly.

The film unfurls much as Effendi’s 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 – literally turning to dust.

Free movement was possible for her father in Soviet days, but is less easy for Effendi. She eventually obtains special permission to enter Armenia. “After about an hour of questioning and the bewildered policeman asking: ‘What are you doing here?’ – ‘I’m here to hunt for this rare species of butterfly,’ sounded like a perfect spy cover story – they let me in,” she says.

Her search for the butterfly is rooted in a quest to discover who her father really was. Her memories of him are fragments – appearing at home and then disappearing again on butterfly-hunting missions. “He had an almost ghostly presence in my life,” she says. “I would find jars with insects inside and his negatives in the wardrobe – vestiges of his life – around the house. One of the reasons for me to delve into this film was he had a full life outside our home. And I wanted to paint that picture of him in more vivid colours, but I couldn’t find those colours in my own history.”

When she became a photojournalist, she spotted the parallels between her career and his. “There 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’s 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] – I see them as captions to my photographs.”

I wanted to paint a picture of him in more vivid colours, but I couldn’t find those colours in my own history

On her visit to Armenia, Effendi’s 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’s butterfly, armed with a net that Kazaryan reveals was made to Rustam’s design, based on a bra. Rustam “multiplied beauty” by having three daughters, Kazaryan says. But Effendi is called “little Effendi invisible girl, just like a butterfly” because, Kazaryan says, his mentor never spoke of her. “He was like a father to me, a good one,” he tells Effendi.

Why wasn’t 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 “my presence is erased from his life” in them. But the letters were wonderful, romantic evocations of his butterflying adventures – of alpine meadows, waterfalls and “poppies the size of teacups”.

“I could hear his voice for the first time. It was almost like being inside his mind for a second,” says Effendi. “And I craved that communication.”

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. “Just like that butterfly is mythological and people refuse to believe it exists because it’s flying over the war border, my father’s life was also mythological,” she says.

With Effendi’s questions growing about her parents’ relationship, she circles back to her mother, who has been “always very evasive” when questioned about Effendi’s 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: “It was the camera’s power that really helped that along.

“When you put someone in the spotlight of a camera, it holds you responsible for telling the truth. The dynamic changes. It wasn’t ‘I’m the daughter and she’s my mother’. It was more ‘I’m an investigator and she’s my subject’. It’s almost cruel, but that’s what the camera does. In the end, she had to open up.” Her mother’s revelation turns Effendi’s understanding of her childhood on its head.

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’s caterpillars feed on.

Effendi extended filming for another year to continue the hunt. “I became obsessed with finding it,” she says. “I dreamed about it.” 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. “He flies above everything,” says Morgun. “For him, there are no borders, no wars, nothing. Just his mountains.”

 Searching for Satyrus is in UK cinemas from 27 April. Rena Effendi will take part in Q&As after special preview screenings