Eleştirmen yorumları

Childhood innocence crashing with a world of great violence is an ongoing motif this season [...] On screen, Izci is big, swearing loudly at adults twice his size and giving a masterful first performance.

Hidden in plain sight within Sivas are a number of subtexts, from the landscape of Anatolia in Eastern Turkey, where the film takes place but also the recognizable and haunting setting of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, to the barbaric practice of dog fighting. I’ll admit at one point the film got too harsh for me, and I don’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

Mujdeci has scant interest in making an issue film; instead, “Sivas” is concerned with the ways in which this violent practice unites and defines the region’s menfolk, their duelling dogs serving as surrogate vessels for their own fractious, sometimes abusive masculinity. While not stinting on the horrors of the tradition, the helmer maintains a calm, scrutinous documentarian’s eye throughout.

The movie might be about a little boy and his dog, but Turkish director Kaan Mujdeci‘s unflinching feature debut, Sivas, ain’t no Lassie. Set in the brutal world of dog fighting in rural eastern Anatolia, this is a strikingly photographed but narratively somewhat baggy tale of a country kid who doesn’t yet know the difference between being right and just wanting to have his way.

A wry humour is also in evidence, not only the universal experiences of childhood friendships and jealousies, but also in the hypocrisy of the adult world [...] Despite the ferocious violence of the dogfighting and the stark poverty, a surprising humanity underpins Sivas, making the film more of a traditional boy-and-his-dog tale than it initially appears.