Trivia

In a small office in Istanbul, Perdeci & Alyamac auditioned 520 children to find the perfect Bedo & Maryam. The auditions lasted for 7 months.

Another complicated task for the production design was the orphanage. Alyamac & Perdeci scouted and found an empty school building from 1890s and turned it into to a working orphanage. Since the filmmakers shot in different seasons, they specifically created a green garden for the Spring which one of the crew members was carefully to constantly water.

Alyamac & Perdeci edited the film in fifty days. Efilm in Los Angeles, CA opened their doors to the filmmakers and they finished the color at Efilm with colorist Joel Mc Williams and printed the film at Deluxe Hollywood.

The second miracle was their bird, Bacik. Bacik means kiss in Armenian. Bacik had twenty-five stand-ins. In the scene when the children say farewell to him, this particular Bacik actually kissed the little boy and flew away - he was clearly saying his own goodbye. None of the other birds flew perfectly like him and the filmmakers caught him on camera.

Alyamac & Perdeci edited Lost Birds in fifty days. Efilm digital laboratories in Los Angeles, CA opened their doors to the filmmakers and they finished the color at Efilm with colorist Joel Mc Williams and printed the film at Deluxe Hollywood.

Alyamac & Perdeci did location scouting for 62 days. They drove, they hiked, they searched inch by inch, mapping out all the locations with a driver. They acted out the scenes together with the actors and shot them with a small camera. Then they edited them at night to see how they matched up to what they had written.

The Pre-production of Lost Birds lasted a year and a half. The directors Alyamac & Perdeci gathered a very small crew in their office and started planning and controlling every step of the production.

It turns out that the working Armenian Churches in Turkey do not let the filmmakers shoot inside for Lost Birds. So, rather than seeing this as an obstacle the directors Alyamac & Perdeci saw it as an opportunity to continue making the most authentic film they could make and made their own church.

Directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci wrote a meticulous 150 pages visual map for Lost Birds.

For the night scenes of Lost Birds, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci wanted to shoot in natural candlelight. Over three months, the filmmakers tested different candles with different styles and wicks. They ended up ordering more than 2000 customized candles for the production.

In Lost Birds, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci wanted to recreate the Armenian Ottoman Village Square, coffee shop, marketplace and shops from the pictures in their archives. Many of the carpenters, electricians, set designers and others worked day and night, in the snow and rain to finish everything on schedule to shoot. It took more than 6 months to construct the entire set.

The story of Lost Birds takes place both in winter and summer. For that reason, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci divided the shooting into winter and summer. The winter part took 6 days in an extremely cold weather approximately -25 degree Celsius.

In Lost Birds, the scene where the horse cart travel in the valley by cracking the ice was real and the directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci had only one chance to shot the scene. To realize this single shot the entire cast and crew needed to wake up at 1.30 am and leave the hotel in the freezing cold.

For the music of Lost Birds, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci had decided to use songs composed by Komitas Vartabed, the great Armenian composer (1869-1935).

For Lost Birds, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci made a list of all the music and musicians who played the great Armenian composer Komitas Vartabed's works and it looked like an impossible task to find all of these musicians who were living around the world or deceased. By way of miracles and luck, Perdeci & Alyamac found the contacts one by one and all of these Armenian musicians.

For Lost Birds church scene, the directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci found an empty Greek church which was appropriate for the shooting for Lost Birds. The filmmakers converted the Greek church into an Armenian one.

In the church scene of Lost Birds, directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci insisted to use real church props and decorations that were used in 100 years ago.

For the Easter Sermon scene of Lost Birds an Armenian High priest came to the shootings with the permission of the church and choreographed the Easter Sermon scene with directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci.

The theme music of Lost Birds is an Armenian lullaby. The musician John Bilezikjian watched and loved Lost Birds and gave the directors Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci his permission for the rights to use his music in ''Lost Birds''. Sadly, he passed away a few days later.

Ela Alyamac & Aren Perdeci claimed that the lost bird children have rescued and are healing back to health, serves as an analogy for man's struggle and hope. In this case, all the struggles and hopes of the Armenian people whose stories were kept in a cage for all these years.