In Searching for Satyrus, writer-photographer Rena Effendi chases “my father’s ghost,” meaning both the soul or spirit of this mysterious man and the rare species of butterfly – found only in the southern part of the Zangezur mountain range along the border region between Armenia and the autonomous republic of Nakhchivan – that bears the name they share: Satyrus effendi.
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Rena Effendi’s Searching for Satyrus is both a film about photography and a photographer’s first film. It’s also a meticulously constructed and surprisingly suspenseful full-length documentary about a daughter’s search for her father, for the elusive butterfly named in his honor, and for some way through and beyond the longstanding conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
As a photographer and photojournalist, Effendi is known chiefly for her work on environmental and social justice issues. Now based in Istanbul, she has traveled far and wide on assignment, from Havana to Chernobyl and from Cairo to Spirit Lake, North Dakota. But her chief stomping ground is the Caucasus Region spanning Eastern Europe and Western Asia, including her native Azerbaijan and its neighbor Armenia – two adjacent countries that have been riven by often violent territorial and ethnic conflict ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Born and raised in Baku on the Caspian coast, Effendi has made the Azerbaijan capital a frequent focus of her work – including her first book, Pipe Dreams (2010), which is about the controversial Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline and the many lives affected by it.
Effendi describes her second book, Liquid Land (2013), as having been “co-authored” with her father, the Soviet lepidopterist Rustam Effendi, despite the fact that she barely knew him before his death in 1991, when Rena was just fourteen years old. Decades later, Rustam remains an important presence in his daughter’s life, chiefly in the form of what the Ancient Greeks would call his psykhḗ, which means both “soul” and “butterfly.” In Searching for Satyrus, Effendi chases “my father’s ghost,” meaning both the soul or spirit of this mysterious man and the rare species of butterfly – found only in the southern part of the Zangezur mountain range along the border region between Armenia and the autonomous republic of Nakhchivan – that bears the name they share: Satyrus effendi.
This scientific nomenclature is made even more meaningful by Rena’s discovery that her father was also something of a satyr himself – a handsome, wild, and raffish womanizer and wine-drinker, who married four times and had many affairs. In searching for her father and his butterfly, Rena interviews surviving friends and colleagues, former lovers, a couple of half-sisters, and even coaxes some startling revelations from her diffident mother. These avowals, memories, conjectures, letters, and photographs all help Rena piece together the complicated puzzle of Rustam’s erotic as well as scientific life.
In the film’s opening scene, Rena uses an old photograph taken by her father to locate the exact spot on which he shot it sixty years earlier. Like her father, she too has become an intrepid hunter, searching doggedly, relentlessly, for traces of her family’s past and also for a living specimen of this solitary, sub-alpine species. Dark brown, with fur-like wing scales and two black-and-white eye-spots, Satyrus effendi has only a very narrow flight period, skimming Zangezur’s rocky, overgrazed hills from mid-July to mid-August – making Rena’s search all the more unlikely to succeed and adding to the film’s suspense.
After obtaining a visa and passing through various checkpoints to enter Armenia, Rena meets with entomologist Mark Kalashian, who tells her that one of her father’s closest colleagues is still alive. She travels to the northern Armenian village of Tsoghamarg to meet this self-taught taxidermist, Pavlik Kazaryan, who is clearly charmed by the daughter of his beloved teacher and friend and is eager to assist her in her search for both the man and the butterfly. Pavlik regales Rena with stories of Rustam’s indulgence in women and wine as they examine his own dusty collection of butterfly specimens and as they hike together through the rugged but spectacular mountain terrain, toting Rena’s cameras and Pavlik’s old Soviet-era butterfly nets.
For her still photographs, Rena uses a waist-level viewfinder camera, through whose lens several shots are filmed, nicely juxtaposing the dual technologies of a photographer-filmmaker. Hand-held or mounted on a tripod, this old viewfinder camera also has the aura of a specimen, like Pavlik’s boxfuls of mounted butterflies and like the old snapshots and letters that constitute the unofficial archive of her father’s life. Their butterfly nets, too, seem like relics of a bygone era – evocative of Victorian gardens, the butterfly-hunting Hemulen in Tove Jansson’s children’s books, and yet another Russian who was obsessed with butterflies, novelist Vladimir Nabokov.
Once she reaches the mountain habitat of Satyrus effendi, Rena’s anxious pursuit of a living specimen takes on an almost quixotic air. After a disappointing day of fruitless searching, she seeks the assistance of another expert, the Russian entomologist Dmitry Morgun, who, like Kazaryan, has also successfully hunted Satyrus effendi. As Dmitry shows Rena specimens of some of the many species in his collection, she asks him if he feels bad about killing them all. “Well, it’s for science,” he chuckles, “so it’s not murder!”
In this moment, Rena’s sense of urgency is focused on the question of whether she will ever see even a single Satyrus effendi alive and not just pinned and desiccated in a display frame. But at least implicitly, her film also poses much larger questions about conservation and perpetuation. What are the best ways to pursue, preserve, and transmit knowledge of the natural world? Do humans have the right to capture and kill members of endangered species, even “for science”? Are preserved specimens always better than photographs of living creatures? If Rena does find a live Satyrus effendi, will she simply admire and photograph it, or will she capture it in her butterfly net? And if she does, what then? Release it? Or take it home and pin it to a spreading board to be mounted and preserved as a kind of symbolic relic of the father who, like Satyrus effendi, was always flitting in and out of her life?
Searching for Satyrus is pervaded by memories of the dead – not just the dead father, husband, and friend at the film’s center, but also the countless known and unknown dead of the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In one segment, Rena visits the Yerablur military cemetery in Yerevan: a collection of Armenian soldiers’ graves and monuments to Armenian victims of the war. In voice-over, she says: “When I look at statistics of deaths of young Armenian soldiers and young Azerbaijani soldiers, I don’t differentiate them by nation. . . . They should not be in the ground.” But at the cemetery she also speaks with a former Armenian soldier who is visiting the graves of his fallen comrades and who – like several other people, from both sides, interviewed in the film – can’t yet get let go of these differentiations. Each of them must decide whom to mourn and how their memories of the dead will be preserved, even as they consider the fate of the many thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons still living in the blighted regions of the Transcaucasus.
Of course, butterflies like Satyrus effendi know nothing of national borders or ethno-religious divisions. Indeed, the species’s few remaining members flit blithely, back and forth, crossing without care the imaginary line that separates Armenia from the disputed territory of Nakhchivan. Meanwhile, most of the people contesting and even dying for the sake of that imaginary line neither know nor care about an obscure species of butterfly that only a handful of human beings have ever seen in the wild. Is it preposterous to ask how their stories might be related? Is it merely naïve and pollyannish to imagine a world in which people would shoot photographs instead of shooting and killing one another? Simply and quietly, Searching for Satyrus says . . . maybe not.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
