Here’s the plot to a movie we would go out of our way to miss: An eleven-year-old boy and a weathered fighting dog develop a strong relationship after the boy finds the dog wounded in a ditch, left to die.

Reviews of Sivas were mixed; some felt that despite stark realism shot with a shaky camera, this was gritty coming-of-age drama about a boy and his dog. The film, however, evoked boos at the 2014 Venice International Film Festival for its non-judgmental stance on the world of underground dog-fighting in rural eastern Anatolia.

Regardless, the film won a Jury Prize and a Best Actor Prize in the Venice Film Festival, and a Best Actor and Child Protection Award in ADFF.  Sivas was also the official submission of Turkey to the Best Foreign Language Film for the 88th Academy Awards in 2016, but it didn’t get a nomination.

Movie reviewers differed in how they identified the breed of the dog in the movie. Alternately referred to as an Anatolian Shepherd and a Kangal, critics may have been confused by the fact that historically, the Kangal Shepherd Dog was a dog of the people of Anatolia, and that some registries classify the dog as an Anatolian Shepherd Dog.

They were all correct.

As of January 1,  2012, the Australian National Kennel Council (ANKC) stopped recognizing the Kangal as a separate breed from the Anatolian Shepherd, and in 2013, the United Kennel Club not only announced that it would recognize the Kangal Shepherd Dog as a breed, but also that dogs currently registered as Anatolian Shepherd Dogs would be eligible (where appropriate) to be recorded as Turkish Kangal Dogs instead.

In 2018, the FCI affected the one breed population model that had been enacted by the ANKC in 2012, and approved the breed name change of Standard No. 331 (Anatolian Shepherd Dog)  to Kangal Shepherd Dog.  All FCI Anatolian Shepherd Dogs now have the breed name of Kangal Shepherd Dog, and if you do a search on either breed name plus “FCI,” you’ll be taken to the same page. 

Image from the movie, Sivas