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ORTHODOX STANCE
Directed & Camera by Jason Hutt
Produced by Hutt & Michel Negroponte
Edited by Jason Hutt & Rachel Kittner
Music by Mark Orton
Released by Oxbow Lake Films
USA. 82 min. Not Rated

Boxing movies usually are set up to root for one guy over the other. It could be the challenger vs. the champion, or the championing of one ethnicity, race, or nationality. Or the triumph over inner demons. So the surprise in Orthodox Stance is that a very personable, singular young welterweight makes the audience, and a colorful array of mentors and supporters, believe boxing really is the sweet science – you just gotta have faith.

Dmitriy Salita emigrated as a child with his family from the Ukraine to Brooklyn. He left the overt discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, but was picked on for being poor and on welfare; he learned to fight back. A common enough trajectory so far. But as director Jason Hutt followed him around for over four years, he found what makes him uncommon, capturing the unlikely contrasting worlds Dmitriy embraces.

At 14, Dmitriy found a refuge among the black and Latino fighters at Brooklyn’s bare Starrett City Boxing Club, which has produced dozens of Golden Glove winners over the last 30 years. After his mother was stricken with cancer, the watchful tutelage of the rawboned, dedicated octogenarian African-American trainer Jimmy O' Pharrow became more and more important to Dmitriy’s physical and professional development.

But in his mother’s hospital room, he needed something more and found it in discussing Orthodox Judaism with her roommate’s husband. That led him to the Chabad of Flatbush, part of the outreach movement of the Hasidic Lubavitch sect that actively encourages non-observant Jews like Dmitriy to adopt the Orthodox Jewish life style, including keeping kosher and the Sabbath. Months into study, he meets the rabbi’s rabid boxing fan brother – a management team matched in heaven. How Dmitriy “found God through boxing” is engrossing. (The title is a pun on both his insistence to not fight on Saturdays and the right-handed boxing technique.)

With a string of victories, hard-working Dmitriy hones his body and ambitiously progresses from amateur to professional, traversing the hedonistic gambling meccas of Las Vegas and Atlantic City (but away from girls). Still under Jimmy O’s paternal eye, he moves up to serious Latino trainers of world champions, including Hector Roca, who trained Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby (for even more of a Hollywood touch). Determined to build his fan base, his strategy focuses on fighting in front of the home crowd, where the film climaxes with his diverse fans cheering as he enters the ring to the chanting of the Hasidic reggae singer Matisyahu.

When Max Baer defeated German Max Schmeling for the heavyweight championship in 1933, he wore a Star of David more for symbolic value than for his own tenuous Jewish identity. The star Dmitriy sports reflects a Jew as comfortable with his own identity as with the multiculturalism that has made this immigrant kid’s dreams come true. Nora Lee Mandel
January 25, 2008