Anni-Kristiina Juuso never saw the complete script for this film, she only got her lines in Finnish, which she then translated into Sámi.
While the two actors, Veikko and Ivan, were in the sauna exchanging their life stories, Ivan told Veikko about a former female colleague/friend marrying a horrible man named Viktor Bychkov - which is the name of the actor playing Psholty/Ivan in real life. Probably a deliberate humorous effect by the director.
'Cuckoo' (as the bird) was military slang for a solitary sniper, the role Veikko is forced to masquerade as.
Mongolian actor Bayaneruul wrote a short story adapted from Cuckoo, which had the same plot, situation, time period, and characters, but with the locale transplanted from Sápmi (Lapland) to Mongolia, and the language of the peasant woman changed from Sámi to Mongolian, and the Finnish soldier's language changed from Suomen (Finnish) to Japanese (a language thought to be related to Finnish). The Russian soldier remained Russian. In 2014 Bayaneruul turned the story into a screenplay and directed the movie himself entitled Norjmaa (2014).
Anni-Kristiina Juuso's debut.