In 2016, documentary photographer, film-maker and writer Rena Effendi looked up her father’s name online. She had always been fascinated by his work: Rustam Effendi was a Soviet-Azerbaijani lepidopterist who studied, collected, and preserved close to 100,000 butterflies before his death in 1991. But, looking back, there was a sense that her father remained an enigma. Then, through that online search, Effendi discovered that a rare endemic butterfly species, Satyrus effendi, had been named in her father’s honour.
The species exists in the contested, mountainous borderlands between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Effendi became obsessed by the idea of such a fragile creature carrying their name, living in a place that humans could no longer freely cross. “Pursuing this species became a way of pursuing [my father], of tracing the paths he once walked and trying to understand what he had left behind.”
And so, armed with a camera, a butterfly net, and her father’s old maps and love letters, Effendi began the work that would become her stirring documentary, Searching for Satyrus, a visual diary of sorts that delicately considers memory, conflict, ephemerality and connection.
“I photographed the landscapes my father once traversed, the meadows and forests where he searched for rare species, the borderlands transformed by war and abandonment,” Effendi says. “I also photographed the people who had known him and still remembered him vividly. Through their stories, fragments of his personality slowly began to emerge. His portrait became fuller, more dimensional, gathering colour, texture and form.”
Searching for Satyrus is screening in select cinemas
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