Ring Cycle

For filmmaker Jason Hutt, who is exploring his own observance, the story of frum welterweight Dmitriy Salita turned out to be a perfect match.

With God on his side: Jason Hutt, far left, chronicles the life of Dmitriy Salita inside the ring and out in “Orthodox Stance.” photo at left by david lincoln; photo above by alex tehran

by Curt Schleier
Special To The Jewish Week

The fight game is filled with iconic characters: the scrappy, working-class champion, the snake-oil-salesman promoter, the loyal-to-a-fault trainer, the Vaseline-wielding cut man. “If you go into any boxing gym, you are going to find incredibly interesting characters,” said filmmaker Jason Hutt. “Every single boxer in the gym has an interesting story. You can point your camera at anyone” and have a great story in view.
Hutt found one such character in Dmitriy Salita, and he has told his very unorthodox story — that of a frum fighter — in the documentary “Orthodox Stance,” which opens Jan. 25 at the Cinema Village Theater.
The filmmaker owes the documentary, at least in part, to a sharp-eyed Jewish mother and to his own Jewish observance.
Just after Hutt,

31, had moved to Brooklyn from North Carolina, where he’d been working at a film production company, his mother sent him a newspaper clip from The Washington Post she thought would interest him. It was about Salita, a young immigrant from the Ukraine who was building an impressive record as a junior welterweight. More remarkable was that he was doing it as an Orthodox Jew.
The idea that this might make an interesting documentary intrigued Hutt on a number of levels.
“At the time I read the article, I was exploring my observance of Judaism,” he said. “I was becoming more kosher and more Shabbos observant myself. When I was growing up, I was religiously proud. I always enjoyed going to services. I enjoyed the holidays. I enjoyed being a Jew. But I didn’t celebrate [Judaism] the way Dmitriy does.”
Back in North Carolina, a girlfriend described him to a third party as “a Jew, but he’s not observant.” That comment bothered Hutt. “I didn’t eat pork. I didn’t mix milk and meat. When I heard someone say I wasn’t observant, it struck a chord with me. When I read this article about Dmitriy, how he kept kosher, the whole nine yards, I wanted to see how he was able to live his life.”
Other factors figured into his decision-making process, as well. For one, Hutt was a Jewish athlete with an obvious passion for sports. He’d run track and won medals in the Maccabee Games, was an all-state high school soccer player in Potomac, Md., where he grew up, and was supposed to play for the Harvard team until injuries curtailed his career. After a film class whetted his appetite for making movies, he interned at a Hollywood production company and after graduating went to work as an assistant to filmmaker Mike Tollin, who made such sports-related features as “Summer Catch,” “Hardball” and “Ready to Rumble.”
Hutt also recognized that “boxing stories are always going to be compelling. Boxing phrases are part of the American lexicon: ‘I’m in your corner,’ ‘get off the mat,’ ‘come out fighting.’ The hard-working boxer is part of the American ethos at this point.”
Hutt had recently completed a documentary, “Breezewood, Pennsylvania,” about a truck stop at the intersection of two interstates, which had just won an award at the Georgetown Film Festival. He saw similarities between it and Salita.
“Breezewood was at a crossroads, and when I read the article I saw that in a sense that Dmitriy was also at a crossroads, between the urban boxing culture on the one hand and the Russian-immigrant Lubavitch culture on the other.”
Hutt contacted Zalman Liberov, Salita’s rabbi, to seek permission to follow the boxer with a camera. Liberov agreed, but the only restriction was that there’d be no shooting on the Sabbath. When the Shabbos candles were lit, the camera was turned off.
Salita was surrounded by an interesting set of characters. The rabbi’s brother, Israel, was his manager. Jimmy O’Pharrow, a tall slender black man who resembles Bill Russell, was his trainer. O’Pharrow is the director of the Starrett City Boxing Club in Brooklyn, where Dmitriy came to learn how to box as a way to ward off neighborhood bullies.
Another character is Bob Arum, Salita’s first promoter. In response to questions, Arum told reporters it was easy to work with Salita “because I know all the [Jewish] rules. Not that I follow them, but I know them.”
Salita was used to media attention, since he got a lot of press when he won the New York City Golden Gloves. But he’d expected Hutt to be around for three weeks. He stayed three years.
Hutt’s timing couldn’t have been better. The fighter, on an unbeaten streak, won the junior welterweight title, went through two promoters and two trainers, and was invited to the White House to help George W. Bush celebrate Chanukah (Salita, though still undefeated, is currently without a promoter and hasn’t fought in a year.).
Before he started shooting “Orthodox Stance,” Hutt saw his share of boxing films, including “When We Were Kings,” about the championship fight in Zaire between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle.” While he was a “fan of the ‘Rocky’ movies,” he doesn’t believe “it was my interest in boxing movies that led me to make this particular film.”
His real inspirations, Hutt said, were films he saw in a Harvard classroom: Fred Wiseman’s “Titticut Follies,” about a Massachusetts correctional facility for the criminally insane and D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. “They showed me that nonfiction films could be crafted to be every bit as exciting as fiction films. Those films had no narrator, no two-camera interviews. You were just observing as a fly on the wall. They showed you in 90 minutes a world you’d never seen, or a personality like Bob Dylan so very intimately.”
And so it is with “Orthodox Stance,” where the intimate world is the gritty universe of boxing, “the sweet science.” Where one minute Dmitriy Salita, the frum fighter with the Star of David on his trunks, is sweetly laying tefillin, and the next he’s laying into a welterweight looking to hurt him. Where one minute he’s preparing a kosher meal in a hotel room with his Orthodox manager, and the next he’s preparing to do battle in the ring, with God on his side. n
“Orthodox Stance” opens Jan. 25 at the Cinema Village (22 E. 12th St. bet. University Place and Fifth Avenue). For information call (212) 924-3363, www.cinemavillage.com.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization