Robb Moss completes his Riverdogs trilogy, returning to five friends in their 70s as lifelong friendship meets the sharp edges of memory, loss, and mortality.
Director: Robb Moss
Runtime: 82
Fest Year: 2026
Robb Moss, a pioneer of personal documentary and a professor in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, has been filming the same group of friends since the late 1970s, when they were twenty-something river guides on the Colorado. Riverdogs (1982) captured the idyll; The Same River Twice (2003) found them reckoning with middle age. With The Bend in the River, executive produced by Frances McDormand and Joel Coen, Moss completes the trilogy. With protagonists now in their seventies, the film weaves nearly fifty years of footage into something that works less like a conventional documentary than a five-person cinematic mosaic. The cuts between past and present are swift and unsparing. What emerges is not nostalgia but an honest, quietly devastating reckoning with time, loss, and the unfinished project of living. (YF)